Gloria Swanson

Gloria Swanson was born in Chicago in 1899 and stumbled into the movies as a teenager, first clowning through knockabout comedies at Mack Sennett's studio. She hated the pratfalls and yearned for something grander, and Cecil B. DeMille gave it to her. In a run of glossy marital dramas beginning with Male and Female (1919), DeMille draped her in furs, jewels, and improbable gowns and turned her into the very image of luxury.

By the early 1920s she was the biggest star at Paramount and one of the most photographed women alive, a fashion icon whose every outfit was studied and copied. She lived as extravagantly as she dressed, and eventually she wanted control as well as fame. Refusing to be merely a studio employee, she formed her own production company and produced Sadie Thompson (1928), playing a fallen woman with a fire that earned her an Academy Award nomination.

Her ambition also led her into disaster: the lavish Queen Kelly (1929), directed by the uncompromising Erich von Stroheim and financed by her lover Joseph Kennedy, spiraled out of control and was never properly finished, costing her a fortune. She made the transition to sound and scored an early talkie hit with The Trespasser, but the Depression and shifting tastes pushed her toward the margins.

Then came the second act that made her legend permanent. In 1950 she agreed to play Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, a faded silent queen clinging to a vanished throne, and delivered a performance of ferocious grandeur that fused her own history with fiction. "I am big," she declares. "It's the pictures that got small." The role earned her another Oscar nomination and became the definitive portrait of silent stardom's afterlife. Swanson lived on into 1983, a shrewd businesswoman and health-food advocate who had outlasted nearly everyone, forever the great lady of the silent screen who got to write her own epitaph.