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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.

Important Added Info: Note that this is a negative that was in the camera when the photographer shot the photo (see below for more on this). We have put a scan of the negative that shows the "positive image" (in addition to a photo of the negative image, so you can better see its condition). REMEMBER THAT WHAT YOU RECEIVE WILL BE A PHOTOGRAPHIC NEGATIVE, NOT A POSITIVE IMAGE LIKE YOU ARE SEEING (however, the archive that owned this made an 8x10 positive print from it that will be included with the negative). However, we will provide the winning bidder of this auction that positive image scan that is both high quality and not watermarked (on request to the winning bidder, and only the winning bidder). We scanned it, so that bidders could see just how high quality it is. What are camera original negatives? These often (but not always) have retouching on the emulsion side, and negative numbers written in India ink on the front. Depending on the studio some 8x10 negatives may be trimmed or have numbers or information embedded into the sides of the negative. Obviously, camera original negatives are far more rare (and far more desirable) than studio-issued ones, but both are very high quality, and both can be used to make extremely high resolution positive prints of the image.

Note that this negative (and 96 others we are currently auctioning, in 97 separate auctions) has a wonderful provenance! From 1938 through the 1960s, movie fans would purchase photos of their favorite movie stars from a company in Brooklyn, New York, called "Movie Star News". This company, owned by Irving Klaw, sold a massive number of repro photos, because it became widely known to have some of the highest quality movie star images there were, as good or better than what the studios themselves produced. It turns out that Klaw had obtained the negatives that he made his photos from directly from the major studios, who apparently did not want to store negatives due to the fear of them being a fire hazard. He amassed an unmatched collection of over 20,000 negatives of all the top Hollywood stars, and over half of them were "camera originals", meaning they were the ones in the camera when the photographer took the image, and were hand retouched by the photographer (if retouching was necessary).

Irving Klaw died in 1966, and his nephew continued his business for many years, but he closed the business in 2012, and the archive of negatives passed through several hands before being acquired by a company that hired a professional archivist to spend over a year cataloging the negatives. The 97 negatives we are currently auctioning are from this amazing archive, and approximately half of them are camera originals, and half are "studio negatives" (created by the studio directly from the camera original). See above for which type of negative the one in this auction is. These include wonderful images of top Hollywood stars! This is an amazing opportunity to not only purchase ultra rare negatives, but also to obtain ones from one of the most legendary archives ever assembled!

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