Saturdays with the Stars: Linda Darnell

Each month of 2019 we will be looking at the careers of leading ladies of Classical Hollywood who were never nominated for an Academy Award as part of our "Saturdays with the Stars" series.  Last month, our focus was on Alice Faye, a major star at Fox during the late 1930's/early 1940's well-known for her work in musicals (whom I fell in love with so go back if you need to catch up).  This month we're going to take a look at the woman whose presence in the Faye vehicle Fallen Angel (where she took over as the star under the watchful eye of Darryl Zanuck) caused Faye to leave show business, Linda Darnell.

Darnell was forced at a young age by an aggressive stage mother to pursue a career in entertainment.  She began modeling at the age of 11, and was acting on the stage as she started puberty.  She fancied herself a stage actress, but her mother was intent on making her daughter into a screen star, and at the age of only 15 got her first starring role when Loretta Young dropped out of Hotel for Women.  Darnell lied about her age early in her career to appear older to get better parts, so it's always hard to tell how much Fox was letting slip by because they had this actress they saw potential in or whether they didn't know that they were partnering a 17-year-old Darnell opposite a nine-years-her-senior Tyrone Power in Brigham Young.  However, Brigham Young was a big hit, and made Darnell a proper star.

Darnell's career had two peaks and plenty of valleys.  From 1940 to about 1943, she was being groomed for stardom, but the young actress didn't like the attention as it seemed like she was only getting praised for her unrivaled looks.  She nearly got dropped from show business (her career was heading down the path of second leads & supporting parts) when she was cast in Fallen Angel, and suddenly everyone took notice of her again.  Fallen Angel was a huge hit, and that lead to movies like My Darling Clementine, Anna and the King of Siam, and the infamous Forever Amber, a movie that we'll highlight as one of our Saturday features this month, and was seen as a potential Gone with the Wind (but went the way of pretty much every film that tried to mirror Gone with the Wind for the next sixty years or so).  Perhaps best of all was her turn in the Oscar-winning movie A Letter to Three Wives, which Darnell was widely expected to receive an Academy Award nomination for but didn't (and if she had, she wouldn't be in our series).

It's impossible to talk about Darnell without also bringing up the misfortune of her off-screen existence.  She had a messy love life (including a doomed affair with Joe Mankiewicz), struggled with alcohol and weight problems, and attempted suicide more than once.  Her death is one of the most horrifying in the history of Hollywood scandals, as she was essentially burned alive when her house caught fire, and rumors have persisted for years that Darnell started the fire as another suicide attempt (the coroner's inquest ruled the death an accident caused by a cigarette not being properly extinguished).  Hollywood is sadly filled with stories of impossibly beautiful women living lives of incredible sadness and despair, but few approach the tragedy of Linda Darnell.  This month, we will examine the artistic output she left behind, her lasting legacy in cinema.