Gene Tierney

Gene Tierney was born to a comfortable Brooklyn family and groomed as a debutante, but she was drawn to acting and made her way from Broadway to a Twentieth Century-Fox contract, where her extraordinary face, high cheekbones, green eyes, a slight overbite that only heightened her allure, made her one of the most photographed women of the 1940s. She was so beautiful that the challenge of her career was persuading audiences and studios to notice she could act.

She met that challenge unforgettably in Laura (1944), Otto Preminger's cool, seductive mystery in which a detective falls in love with the portrait of a woman presumed murdered. Tierney's Laura, glimpsed, imagined, and finally alive, became one of the screen's great romantic enigmas. She followed it with her boldest performance, the beautiful, monstrous Ellen in Leave Her to Heaven (1945), a woman whose possessive love curdles into murder; the role earned her an Academy Award nomination and remains a startling study of glamour turned lethal. She was tender and funny opposite Rex Harrison's spirit in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947) and moving in The Razor's Edge.

Her private life brought a grief that overshadowed her success. While pregnant during the war, she contracted rubella from a fan who broke a quarantine to meet her, and her daughter Daria was born with severe disabilities, a devastation the actress carried for the rest of her life. Tierney later suffered from serious mental illness, endured hospitalization and shock treatments, and stepped away from films for years.

She made a dignified partial return in the late 1950s and 1960s before retiring to a quieter life. She wrote with unusual candor about her breakdown and her losses, helping to lift some of the shame that surrounded mental illness. Ravishing on screen and quietly courageous off it, Tierney left behind a handful of indelible performances and a life story of beauty shadowed by sorrow.