Actress, born in Huntsville, Alabama, USA. She was brought up in New York City and Washington, and made her stage debut in 1918. She won Critic awards for her two most famous stage roles, Regina in The Little Foxes (1939) and Sabina in The Skin of Our Teeth (1942). Her most outstanding film portrayal was in Lifeboat (1944).
Tallulah Brockman Bankhead (January 31, 1902 - December 12, 1968) was an American actress, talk-show host and bonne vivante.
Biography
Early life
Bankhead was born in Huntsville, Alabama to speaker of the United States House of Representatives William Brockman Bankhead and Adelaide Eugenia Sledge. Bankhead II, and granddaughter of Senator John H. Bankhead, all Democrats. Bankhead was also a Democrat.
Her family sent her to various schools in an attempt to keep her out of trouble, which included a year at a Catholic convent school (although her father was a Methodist and her mother [who died at her birth], was an Episcopalian).
Early career
At 15, Bankhead won a movie-magazine beauty contest and convinced her family to let her move to New York. Once, while in attendance at a party, a guest made a comment about rape, and Bankhead replied "I was raped in our driveway when I was eleven.
In 1923, she made her debut on the London stage, where she was to appear in over a dozen plays in the next eight years, most famously, The Dancers.
Mid career
She returned to the US in 1931 to be Paramount Pictures' "next Marlene Dietrich", but Hollywood success eluded her in her first four films of the 30s.
She was pretty, outspoken, uninhibited, and it's said that any who met her never forgot her.
Rumors about her sex life have lingered for years, and she has been linked romantically with many notable female personalities of the day, including Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Eva Le Gallienne, Hattie McDaniel, and Alla Nazimova, as well as writer Mercedes de Acosta, and Billie Holiday. However, later reports show that Bankhead disliked de Acosta greatly, finding her unattractive, and was most likely never involved with her sexually, on one occasion telling friends that de Acosta looked like "a mouse in a topcoat". The two women played tennis together often, and were said to have enjoyed one another's company, but even though Garbo has since been publicly identified as having been lesbian, she was extremely protective of her private life and secretive about her lovers (who also included such actors as Yul Brynner and John Barrymore).
Actress Patsy Kelly admitted to author Boze Hadleigh, in his 1996 book about lesbianism in Hollywood's early years, that she had a long standing lesbian affair with Bankhead.
In 1932 she had expressed some interest in spirituality, but did not outwardly pursue it, except for a time when she met with the Indian mystic, Meher Baba.
It was in 1933 that Bankhead nearly died following a 5-hour emergency hysterectomy for an advanced case of gonorrhea, contracted - she said - from either actor George Raft or Gary Cooper.
In 1934, after recuperating in Alabama, she returned to England.
Her screen test for Gone with the Wind put her out of the running for good; Unable to capture Hollywood, Bankhead returned to her most-loved acting medium, the stage.
Returning to Broadway, Bankhead's career stalled in unmemorable plays until she played the cold and ruthless Regina Giddens in Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes (1939). Her portrayal won her the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Performance, but Bankhead and Hellman feuded over the Soviet Union's invasion of Finland: Bankhead (a staunch anti-Communist) was said to want a portion of one performance's proceeds to go to Finnish relief;
More success and the same award followed her 1942 performance in Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, in which Bankhead played Sabina, the housekeeper and temptress, opposite Fredric March and Florence Eldridge (Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus, and also husband and wife offstage). During the run of the play, some media accused Bankhead of a running feud with the play's director, Elia Kazan, but both denied it.
In 1944, Alfred Hitchcock cast her as the cynical journalist, Constance Porter, in Lifeboat.
After World War II, Bankhead appeared in a revival of Noel Coward's Private Lives, taking it on tour and then to Broadway for the better part of two years. The play's run made Bankhead a fortune. From that time, Bankhead could command 10% of the gross and was billed larger than any other actor in the cast, although she usually granted equal billing to Estelle Winwood, a frequent co-star, and Bankhead's "best friend" from the 1920s until Bankhead's death in 1968.
Bankhead circulated widely in the celebrity crowd of her day, and was a party favorite for outlandish stunts like performing underwearless cartwheels in a skirt or entering a soirée stark naked.
Like her family, Bankhead was a Democrat, but broke with most Southerners by campaigning for Harry Truman's reelection in 1948.
Late career
Though Tallulah Bankhead's career slowed in the mid-1950s, she never faded from the public eye. Although a heavy drinker and consumer of sleeping pills (she was a life-long insomniac), Bankhead continued to perform in the 1950s and 1960s on Broadway, in the occasional film, as a highly-popular radio show host, and in the new medium of television. Bankhead's radio program on NBC was The Big Show (she was one of many rotating hosts) and was billed to stem the tide of television.
Bankhead also appeared as a strong Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire (1956), but reviews were poor.
Her last appearance on screen came in March of 1967 as the villainess Black Widow in the Batman TV series.
According to author Brendan Gill, when Bankhead entered the hospital for an illness, an article was headed "Tallulah Hospitalized, Hospital Tallulahized." This headline was a testament to Bankhead's large, charismatic personality (which inspired much of the "personality" of the character Cruella De Vil in Disney's One Hundred and One Dalmatians).
Tallulah had no children, but was the godmother of Brook and Brockman Seawell, children of her lifelong friend and actress Eugenia Rawls and Rawls' husband, Donald Seawell.
An avid baseball fan, Bankhead was a huge fan of the New York Giants.
Death
Tallulah Bankhead died in New York City of double pneumonia arising from influenza, complicated by emphysema, at the age of 66 on December 12, 1968, and is buried in Saint Paul's Churchyard, Chestertown, Maryland.
Signature quotes
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Tallulah Bankhead I'll come and make love to you at five o'clock.MI5 investigation of Eton school scandal
Recently declassified papers thrust Tallulah in the limelight of public scandal posthumously.
The documents compiled by the British Aliens and Immigration Department allege that the investigation was scuttled by a determined cover-up by Eton's headmaster, Dr C A Alington.
The dossier, assembled when she was 32, contains allegations that while in Britain the actress:
performed indecent acts with under-age boys from Eton College was a lesbian who was also promiscuous with men was thrown out of her home by her father because of immoral conduct moved in a social circle which was a centre of vice.In the whole of the file there was no credible evidence that Miss Bankhead had any "abnormal" sexual tendencies, or that any grounds existed to keep her out of Britain.
The report that a group of Eton boys took part in a sex session with her at an hotel in Berkshire was discreetly investigated by police and the headmaster was interviewed.
However, the investigator known only as FHM wrote: "The headmaster is obviously not prepared to assist HO (Home office) by revealing what he knows of her exploits with some of the boys, i.e., he wants to do everything possible to keep Eton out of the scandal."
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