GLORIA DICKSON

Gloria Dickson was an actress from the 1930s and 1940s. She was born "Thais Alalia Dickerson" in 1917, and started acting in high school. At 19, she was signed to a Warner Bros. contract. In her very first movie, she was given the female lead in a major Warner Bros. movie, "They Won't Forget" (which is also remembered as being Lana Turner's first movie, although her character dies early on). For this great good fortune, Gloria Dickson was nicknamed "The Luckiest Girl in Hollywood", which would prove to be extremely ironic, because while she got some good roles over the coming year, she then made the disastrous mistake of marrying a makeup artist who convinced her to get a nose job so she would be "more glamorous", but it had just the opposite effect, and she was reduced to taking parts in B-movies. She divorced her husband and married again, but that marriage also was brief. By 1945, she was an alcoholic and unemployed and overweight. She married a former boxer, and she was taking a nap in their house when it caught on fire, and she was trapped in the house and died, and she was only 27 years old. This is yet another of many examples of people for whom Hollywood fame and fortune was very fleeting, and resulted in an early tragic death.