Celebrity Then & Now

Long before he became the definitive James Bond, Sean Connery delivered milk, watched over swimmers as a lifeguard, and polished coffins for a living. His path to Hollywood stardom was anything but glamorous. He even spent his early twenties as a competitive bodybuilder, a chapter of his life almost no one associates with the suave … Read more

In 1949, Rita Hayworth traded Hollywood soundstages for a life among European royalty. Her marriage to Prince Aly Khan made her a princess overnight, one of the most talked-about unions of the era. The fairy tale, so dazzling in the headlines, collapsed within a few short years, leaving Hayworth to rebuild a life and career … Read more

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

For years, those around Rita Hayworth assumed her forgetfulness, mood swings, and erratic behavior were the result of alcoholism, a rumor that followed her relentlessly through the 1970s. The truth, when it finally emerged, was something almost no one at the time understood. Hayworth was suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, a condition so poorly recognized … 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

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

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

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

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

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