Frances Farmer was an intelligent, attractive and determined movie and stage actress of the 1930s and 40s. In high school in Seattle she won an essay contest that brought her to the USSR for a tour. Her rigid mother, back in Seattle, later claimed that Farmer had been brainwashed but in reality it could hardly have been more than a light rinse. Farmer was a resolute collectivist and iconoclast. Her winning essay had been titled "God Died."
At any rate she looked for stage work in New York but began her career in Hollywood instead, a place that stage actors despised at the time. She was young, beautiful, magnetic but never much of a bravura actress. She returned to Broadway, had an affair with the famous playwright Clifford Odetts, was dumped by him, and began drinking heavily.
She was ever more easily angered, leading to her losing her parts in New York and, after a few lesser roles in lesser films, her parts in Hollywood as well. Farmer was picked up for drunk driving and the paparazzi caught a disheveled woman kicking out at police officers. She was committed several times to a psychiatric institute in Washington. Her autobiography describes it as a snake pit, with lesbian rapes, water hoses, and all the rest of the psychiatric torture iconography. It's thought that one of her husbands embellished the horror in order to boost sales and I believe it. Before the advent of phenothiazines hospitals were hardly more than warehouses for the deranged, overcrowded and generally pretty miserable, but on the other hand none of them was Bedlam.
Thereafter her career -- her whole life course -- was lowly, interrupted by occasional brief periods of satisfaction. She was discovered by a promoter while serving as a receptionist in Eureka, California, where it always rains and where it's easy to forget who and what you were. He brought her back into public life but her drinking precluded anything resembling stability.
It would have been nice if she had survived into a placid and relatively peaceful old age, perhaps with a caring mate, a rose garden, and a few cats and dogs but that likelihood was cut short too and she died of cancer at the age of 56.
At any rate she looked for stage work in New York but began her career in Hollywood instead, a place that stage actors despised at the time. She was young, beautiful, magnetic but never much of a bravura actress. She returned to Broadway, had an affair with the famous playwright Clifford Odetts, was dumped by him, and began drinking heavily.
She was ever more easily angered, leading to her losing her parts in New York and, after a few lesser roles in lesser films, her parts in Hollywood as well. Farmer was picked up for drunk driving and the paparazzi caught a disheveled woman kicking out at police officers. She was committed several times to a psychiatric institute in Washington. Her autobiography describes it as a snake pit, with lesbian rapes, water hoses, and all the rest of the psychiatric torture iconography. It's thought that one of her husbands embellished the horror in order to boost sales and I believe it. Before the advent of phenothiazines hospitals were hardly more than warehouses for the deranged, overcrowded and generally pretty miserable, but on the other hand none of them was Bedlam.
Thereafter her career -- her whole life course -- was lowly, interrupted by occasional brief periods of satisfaction. She was discovered by a promoter while serving as a receptionist in Eureka, California, where it always rains and where it's easy to forget who and what you were. He brought her back into public life but her drinking precluded anything resembling stability.
It would have been nice if she had survived into a placid and relatively peaceful old age, perhaps with a caring mate, a rose garden, and a few cats and dogs but that likelihood was cut short too and she died of cancer at the age of 56.
