Darnell, Linda (1921–1965)

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Darnell, Linda (1921–1965)

American actress. Born Monetta Eloyse Darnell in Dallas, Texas, on October 16, 1921; died from injuries sustained in a house fire in Glenview, Illinois, on April 10, 1965; third of five children of a postal clerk; attended public schools in Dallas; attended Central High School in Los Angeles and had studio tutoring; married Peverell Marley (a cinematographer), on April 18, 1943 (divorced 1951); married Philip Liebmann, on February 25, 1954 (divorced 1955); married Merle Roy Robertson (a pilot), on March 3, 1957 (divorced 1963); children: Charlotte Mildred, called Lola (adopted in 1948).

Selected films:

Hotel for Women (1939); Daytime Wife (1939); Stardust (1940); Brigham Young (1940); The Mark of Zorro (1940); Chad Hanna (1940); Blood and Sand (1941); Rise and Shine (1941); The Loves of Edgar Allan Poe (1942); The Song of Bernadette (1943); Buffalo Bill (1944); It Happened Tomorrow (1944); Summer Storm (1944); Sweet and Lowdown (1944); The Great John L. (1945); Fallen Angel (1945); Hangover Square (1945); Anna and the King of Siam (1946); Centennial Summer (1946); My Darling Clementine (1946); Forever Amber (1947); The Walls of Jericho (1948); Unfaithfully Yours (1948); A Letter to Three Wives (1949); Slattery's Hurricane (1949); Everybody Does It (1949); No Way Out (1950); The Thirteenth Letter (1951); The Lady Pays Off (1951); The Guy Who Came Back (1951); Saturday Island (1952); Night without Sleep (1952); Blackbeard the Pirate (1952); Second Chance (1953); This Is My Love (1954); Dakota Incident (1956); Zero Hour (1957); Black Spurs (1965).

Linda Darnell may have been one of the most reluctant film stars of the 1940s. "I had no great talent, and I never wanted to be a movie star," she once recalled. "But my mother had always wanted it for herself, and I guess she projected through me. I was going to become a movie star or mom was going to burst in the attempt." By age four, Darnell was taking tapdancing lessons and was enrolled in every local talent contest. At 11, she was modeling for a local department store and, at 14, entered her first beauty contest. Two years later, she won a regional "Gateway to Hollywood" contest and was screentested by RKO, but she was sent home to Dallas within a short time to grow up a bit. In 1939, a talent scout from Fox remembered

her from the Gateway contest and wired her to come to Hollywood, where she became a contract player. After only three weeks of acting lessons, her first role in the movie Hotel for Women (1939) prompted one critic to remark that she would not be a challenge to Bette Davis for quite some time.

With her delicate, even features and dark hair and eyes, Darnell was perfect for the innocent heroines and faithful wives of her early pictures, such as Daytime Wife (1939) with Tyrone Power. Her role in The Mark of Zorro (1940), again with Power, was her first Technicolor film, and the close-ups boosted her star status. All the while, Darnell's mother continued to meddle in her career, requesting that Fox transfer her husband from the Dallas postal system to Beverly Hills and arranging for her daughter's contract to place much of her pay in a Darnell family trust.

Linda Darnell moved from her parents' home in 1942 and a year later eloped to Las Vegas with cinematographer Peverell Marley, who was already twice divorced and 20 years her senior. "I need an older, experienced man to guide me," she told the press. "Everyone else on the lot pampered me and treated me as if I were a baby." The couple adopted a little girl in 1948, three years before the marriage ended. A second marriage in 1954 to Philip Liebmann (of the New York brewery family) would only last a year. Her last marriage, to pilot Merle Robertson in 1957, would end in a bitter divorce in 1963. During the hostile proceedings, Robertson charged Darnell with continual drunkenness and neglect of marital duties. Darnell countered with accusations that Robertson had fathered a child with a Yugoslavian actress.

During the 1940s, Darnell turned to more sultry roles, beginning with Olga the woodcutter's daughter in an adaptation of a Chekhov story called Summer Storm (1944). She hoped the role would serve as a more dramatic vehicle, but the film was considered mediocre, as was Hangover Square (1945), a horror movie in which she played a music-hall trollop who is murdered by an insane composer. This was followed by her portrayal of a siren in Fallen Angel (1945). In 1946, Darnell was paired with Jeanne Crain and Cornel Wilde in the popular musical Centennial Summer.

The best opportunity of her career came when she replaced British import Peggy Cummins as the arrogant hussy in Forever Amber (1947), a film based on Kathleen Winsor 's best-selling novel set in the reign of Charles II. Under the direction of Otto Preminger, the long-awaited and much-hyped film premiered on October 22, 1947, but received only a lukewarm reception from audiences. Darnell made several other films for Fox, including Unfaithfully Yours (1948), A Letter to Three Wives (1949), which was probably the best of the lot, and No Way Out (1950), before the termination of her contract in 1952.

She appeared in low-budget minor films during the remainder of the 1950s (including several in Italy) and made an inauspicious stage debut in A Roomful of Roses (1956) in Phoenix, Arizona, far enough off the beaten track to avoid big-city critics. In addition to a subsequent tour in Tea and Sympathy, she was also seen on television, appearing on "Playhouse 90," "Climax," "77 Sunset Strip," "Rawhide," and the "Jane Wyman Theater." In October 1956, Darnell joined the cast of an ill-fated Broadway production called Harbor Lights, in which she played a Staten Island housewife opposite Robert Alda and Paul Langton. Unfortunately, this time she did not escape notice. Critic Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times was unmerciful: "As the Mother, the beautiful Linda Darnell … goes through each scene with the same distaste for the story, the symbolism and the scenery." The play closed after four performances.

Darnell's later career included further stage tours and a nightclub act that received a fair re-view from Variety. By some accounts, the fading of her beauty and the downward spiral of her career led to a drinking problem. The actress died unexpectedly in April 1965, the result of injuries sustained in a fire at the home of her onetime secretary, whom she was visiting after touring in Janus. Her last film, a mini-budgeted western called Black Spurs, opened shortly after her death. The New York Times review provided a sad epitaph: "Poor departed Linda Darnell. The actress did her last turn yesterday—playing the small role of a saloon hostess that almost anybody could have ambled through."