3

Before the world knew her as Rita Hayworth, the woman on screen was born Margarita Carmen Cansino, daughter of a family of professional Spanish dancers. To become the star Hollywood wanted, she had to physically and painfully remake herself. The transformation studio executives put her through remains one of the more extreme examples of how … Read more

Cary Grant was, by nearly every measure, the most effortlessly charming man in Hollywood. On screen, he made romance look easy. Off screen, across five marriages, he admitted he spent most of his life searching for something the movies never quite showed him how to find. It was only late in life that he finally … Read more

The man the world came to know as Cary Grant was born Archie Leach in a working-class neighborhood of Bristol, England. At just fourteen, he ran away from home to join a troupe of traveling acrobats, a decision that set him on an improbable path to becoming one of the most sophisticated leading men in … Read more

In the late 1950s, at the height of his fame, Cary Grant began a secret and highly unconventional treatment: therapeutic LSD sessions under a psychiatrist’s supervision. He underwent the treatment more than one hundred times, years before the drug was made illegal. He later spoke about it more openly than almost anyone would have expected … Read more

To audiences, Vivien Leigh was the picture of grace, an Oscar-winning beauty who brought Scarlett O’Hara and Blanche DuBois to life with unforgettable intensity. Behind that performance was a woman fighting a private, often terrifying battle that few around her fully understood at the time. Leigh lived with what we now recognize as bipolar disorder, … Read more

Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier were, for a generation, the most celebrated couple in British theater and film, a romance so intense it began as an affair while both were still married to other people. For twenty years, their marriage captivated the public. It also slowly, painfully wore down under pressures few outside their circle … Read more

The search for Scarlett O’Hara was one of the most exhaustive casting hunts in Hollywood history. Producer David O. Selznick auditioned more than fourteen hundred actresses over two years before he found the woman he wanted. Vivien Leigh, a relatively unknown British actress, landed the role just weeks before filming began, in one of the … Read more

Humphrey Bogart had already been married three times when he met Lauren Bacall on the set of To Have and Have Not in 1944. She was nineteen. He was forty-four, and married to someone else. Against every expectation, this was the marriage that finally lasted, holding until his death twelve years later. An Instant, Undeniable … Read more

Humphrey Bogart built a career playing tough, unflinching characters who faced danger without blinking. In 1956, he faced the most difficult role of his life off screen, a diagnosis of esophageal cancer that would claim him within a year. True to the persona he had built over decades, he kept working for as long as … Read more

Lauren Bacall was only nineteen years old, making her very first film, when nerves got the better of her on set. What began as an anxious coping habit became one of the most iconic screen looks in Hollywood history, and it was on that same set that she fell in love with a man twenty-five … Read more