How film icon Gloria Grahame’s affair with stepson even shocked Hollywood — as she spent her final days in Liverpool council house
The Oscar winner was the go-to actress for roles such as good-time gal and femme fatale — but her scandalous personal life led to a fall from grace
GLORIA GRAHAME won an Oscar for her role in The Bad And the Beautiful – and the title could sum up her life story.
She was the go-to actress when directors needed a good-time gal, gangster’s moll or femme fatale — but her scandalous personal life led to a massive fall from grace.
Hollywood could not forgive her after she had bedded her 13-year-old stepson.
Suddenly the roles dried up for the once shining star of The Big Heat, Human Desire and Oklahoma!.
From living in a mansion next to Humphrey Bogart, Gloria suddenly found herself chasing stage roles in Britain, holed up in cheap hotels.
The faded screen siren spent her final days battling cancer in a council house in Liverpool — being cared for by the parents of her ex-toyboy lover, Peter Turner.
How she ended up there in October 1981 is told in the movie Film Stars Don’t Die In Liverpool, which is in cinemas on Friday.
It is based on 65-year-old Peter’s 1986 memoir of the same name.
The film stars Annette Bening as Gloria and Billy Elliot actor Jamie Bell as the lover who was 29 years her junior — Peter was 26 and Gloria 55 when they met in 1978.
It is a sensitive take on their unlikely two-year romance and her desire to confront the killer disease quietly, rather than with her troubled family back in America.
Annette, 59, says: “I think Gloria was a handful. No question. And she was attracted to men who were complicated.
“She’d had a really rough life, a scandalous, tempestuous life. She had four children. Four marriages. She married her stepson and had children with him.”
Born in California in 1923, Gloria was the youngest daughter of British stage actress Jean Hallward, who groomed her for greater success. Her older sister, Joy, married Robert Mitchum’s younger brother, John.
By the time she had turned 20, MGM had signed Gloria on a seven-year contract and told her to use her mother’s maiden name.
She made her mark in her second film, 1946’s It’s A Wonderful Life, with James Stewart, as the flirty, Violet, and got an Oscar nomination for Crossfire the following year.
Gloria was also praised for her 1950 role in the lesser known In A Lonely Place, with Bogart.
Controversially, for that part she dared to go naked under a sheet rather than wear a nightgown.
It fired up the critics, but a defiant Gloria declared: “I sleep in the raw because it’s comfortable.
“Evolution has caught up with the nightgown manufacturers and they don’t want to admit it.”
In 1952 she won her Best Supporting Actress Oscar for The Bad And The Beautiful — even though she was only on screen for nine minutes.
Despite her obvious allure, she was unhappy with her looks. She would stuff cotton pads or tissues under her top lip to make it look fuller and pad out any wrinkles. It was a trick her disgusted co-stars only discovered during kissing scenes.
Later she resorted to plastic surgery on her upper lip and she also had her chin reduced.
While her acting career was a big success, Gloria’s love life was a series of disasters.
In 1946 she filed for divorce from her first husband, actor Stanley Clements, after less than a year of marriage. Then he beat her up when they got back together.
In 1948, on the same day her annulment finally came through, she married Rebel Without A Cause director Nicholas Ray in Las Vegas.
Gloria was four months pregnant with their son Timothy, but the relationship was doomed from the start. Nicholas gambled away £30,000 in Sin City on their wedding night so she wouldn’t get her hands on it, and later admitted: “I was infatuated by her, but I didn’t like her very much.”
Three years in, that dislike turned to loathing when Nicholas walked in on Gloria in bed with his 13-year-old son Tony at their Malibu home.
The marriage imploded — although the reason why was kept secret for almost a decade.
Her next trip up the aisle was with TV producer Cy Howard. It lasted three years and produced daughter Marianna, but was almost as stormy as her last marriage.
Gloria pulled a gun on Cy during one explosive row and cut up his clothes in another.
Hollywood turned a blind eye to all the scandals until 1962, when it was revealed that Gloria had married stepson Tony two years earlier in a secret ceremony in Mexico.
Publicly she was defiant, saying: “I married Nicholas Ray, the director. People yawned. Later on I married his son and from the press’s reaction you’d have thought I was committing incest or robbing the cradle.”
Privately, she was having a breakdown and endured electric shock therapy treatment to cure her depression. At the same time she was locked in a custody battle with Cy who claimed she was an unfit mum.
Her union with Tony lasted longer than any other. They had two sons, Anthony Jnr and James, and stayed together for 14 years. But Nicholas never forgave either of them and remained estranged from his son until the end.
In 1978, with her movie and TV career behind her, Gloria headed to London’s West End. She was staying in digs in North London when she met and fell for jobbing actor Peter Turner.
He recalled: “First friends and then lovers, we were an unlikely couple, and not just because she was almost 30 years older than me and had been married four times.
“I was one of nine children and had grown up in a Liverpool council house. She was the daughter of a determined Los Angeles stage mother who taught elocution.”
In the 1970s it was unusual for a young man to date a woman three decades his senior.
As Jamie Bell, 31, puts it: “The nature of their relationship at that time was almost taboo, with her being an older woman.”
When the romance became serious Peter went with her back to New York and moved into her apartment.
But she kept disappearing without explanation and in 1980 he returned to Merseyside, frustrated by her distant manner.
A year later he finally discovered why the once vibrant woman had become secretive and pushed him away — Gloria had been diagnosed with breast cancer and not told him.
Peter got a call from a theatre in Lancaster, where she was appearing, to say Gloria had collapsed and was in hospital.
Believing that all she needed was bed rest and refusing all medical help, she asked Peter if she could stay with his family in Liverpool.
He says: “So began the sad six days in which Gloria lay dying upstairs in my parents’ house while I defied her wishes and contacted her eldest children and let them know that they needed to come as soon as possible.”
Her family took her back to New York in October 1981, where she died, aged 57, just a few hours after being admitted to hospital.
In her final days Gloria had turned her back on Hollywood, which had shunned her.
Instead she chose to spend those precious moments with a man who had once cared for her deeply.
Summing up Gloria, Annette Bening says: “There is something unique about her and, God knows, about her personal life.
“Looking at this connection she had with Peter, I’ve ended up thinking he must have been the gentlest, most loving, accepting person that she probably had ever been with.”
