Norma Shearer

Born in Montreal to a family that slid from comfort into near-poverty, Norma Shearer arrived in New York as a teenager with a slight cast in one eye and a body deemed too short and unremarkable for stardom. A skeptical Florenz Ziegfeld turned her down; D.W. Griffith found her wanting. She turned rejection into a training program, hiring an eye doctor to correct her gaze and drilling herself relentlessly before the camera, willing herself into beauty through sheer discipline.

Her break came when Irving Thalberg, the brilliant young production chief at the newly formed MGM, signed her and, in 1927, married her. The partnership made her the most protected actress in Hollywood, but she was no mere beneficiary of favoritism; she fought Thalberg for the roles she wanted and proved she could carry them. She won the Academy Award for The Divorcee (1930), campaigning for the part by posing for daring photographs to convince her own husband she could play a woman of frank sexual appetite.

Through the pre-Code years she specialized in sophisticated, sexually modern heroines, then pivoted to prestige in the mid-1930s with lavish literary vehicles: Romeo and Juliet, and a sumptuous Marie Antoinette (1938) that traced a queen's path from frivolity to the scaffold. Her tart, brittle Countess in The Women (1939) showed she could hold a screen crowded with rivals.

Thalberg's sudden death in 1936 left her a wealthy widow and, for a time, adrift. In a decision that haunts her legacy, she declined both Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind and the lead in Mrs. Miniver, two of the era's defining roles. She retired in 1942, still handsome and only in her early forties, and spent four decades in near-total seclusion, her fame quietly eclipsed by stars she had once outranked. Yet in her prime she was the standard against which MGM measured its leading ladies, an architect of her own celebrity in an age that rarely let women build anything.