GLORIA GRAHAME

Gloria Grahame was born in 1923. After some minor roles beginning in 1944, she got her big break with the part of the "bad girl" in It's a Wonderful Life in 1946, and followed that with a role in Crossfire (nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for this film) the following year. She LOOKED like a "bad girl" and those were the parts she was offered, and she played them extremely well, in many movies, with her most memorable performance as the gangster's moll in Fritz Lang's The Big Heat, who gets a pot of hot coffee thrown in her face by Lee Marvin! She had memorable supporting roles in The Bad and the Beautiful (winner of the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for this film), Oklahoma (as Ado Annie), and The Greatest Show on Earth. In 1948 she married Nicholas Ray, who was 12 years her senior, and who had a son from a previous marriage (she had also been married previously), and two years later she starred in In a Lonely Place for her director/screenwriter husband. They divorced two years later (supposedly after Ray found her in bed with his son from a former marriage), and after a third failed marriage, In 1960 Grahame married Anthony Ray, that former stepson by Ray, and they had two children together! She passed away in 1981 at the age of 57 from stomach cancer.