Swanson, Gloria

Swanson, Gloria (1897-1983), American actress and one of Hollywood's earliest heroines, who was born Gloria Josephine Mae Swenson in Chicago and died in New York. She began working in films at the age of 16, married Wallace Beery, and moved to Hollywood with him, where she quickly found work in Mack Sennett silent films. In pictures directed by Cecil B. DeMille between 1918 and 1921 (for example, Don't Change Your Husband, 1919; Male and Female, 1919; For Better for Worse, 1919) she became an international erotic idol.

From the start, Swanson set out to control her own career, and was singularly successful in doing so. Her relationship with directors was vital—she tended to stay with those who knew best how to centre a film on her personality, her range of expression, and the clothes she could wear to best advantage. Hence, she made a number of films with DeMille, Sam Wood, and Allan Dwan (notably Manhandled, 1924, and Stage Struck, 1925), but only four with other directors. Swanson then went into a production partnership with Joseph Kennedy, millionaire father of the future president, and achieved a major success with an adaptation of the Somerset Maugham play Sadie Thompson (1928), in which she played opposite Lionel Barrymore and Raoul Walsh; but the next project, Queen Kelly, with Erich von Stroheim, was called off in the middle of shooting, wrecking von Stroheim's directing career. Swanson negotiated the passage from silent film to talkies with ease, actually singing in her first sound film, The Trespasser (1929), and quickly taking to comedy in What a Widow! (1930), regarded as one of her best films. Afterwards, her screen career declined steeply as she turned her attention more and more to radio and theatre. After several attempted comebacks, she achieved success, supported by her old rival, von Stroheim, in Sunset Boulevard (1950) as Norma Desmond (“I'm still big, it's the pictures that got small”) and thereafter faded from sight, apart from an appearance—as herself—in the disaster film Airport 1975 (1974).