Evelyn Keyes

Evelyn Louise Keyes was born on November 20, 1916, in Port Arthur, Texas, to Omar Dow Keyes and Maude Ollive Keyes, whose father was a Methodist minister. When her father died while she was three years old, Keyes relocated with her mother to Atlanta, Georgia, where the two lived with her grandparents. As a teenager, she took dancing lessons and performed for local organizations including the Daughters of the Confederacy.

Keyes began her professional performance career on Broadway, appearing in productions between 1925 and 1928. Her Broadway credits included the musicals Keep Shufflin' and Lucky Sambo. By age 18 she was working as a chorus girl, and she subsequently traveled to Hollywood, where Cecil B. DeMille signed her to a personal contract without requiring a screen test. Following a series of B movies at Paramount Pictures, she was cast in Say It in French (1938) but was replaced by Olympe Bradna before the film was completed.

Her most celebrated early role came when she auditioned for the part of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939). Although she did not win that role, producer David O. Selznick was struck by her Southern accent and cast her as Scarlett's sister Suellen in January 1939. Columbia Pictures subsequently signed her to a contract, and she spent much of the early 1940s as the lead in numerous B dramas and mysteries for the studio. In 1941 she appeared as an ingenue in Here Comes Mr. Jordan. Her most commercially successful Columbia credit came in 1946, when she played the female lead opposite Larry Parks in The Jolson Story. She followed that film with the screwball comedy The Mating of Millie alongside Glenn Ford, and in 1949 she took the role of Kathy Flannigan in Mrs. Mike, which she later identified as her best film.

While under contract at Columbia, Keyes had long expressed dissatisfaction with the roles the studio offered her. John Huston, her then-estranged husband and partner at Horizon Pictures, proposed her for the film noir thriller The Prowler, produced by Sam Spiegel. Keyes starred in the 1951 film alongside Van Heflin and considered it the finest role and performance of her career. Her last appearance in a major film was a supporting part as Tom Ewell's vacationing wife in The Seven Year Itch (1955). She officially retired in 1956, though she continued to act after that date.

In her personal life, Keyes married Barton Bainbridge shortly after her time on Say It in French. Bainbridge was an alcoholic who threatened her with a gun on at least one occasion; the two separated, and in 1940 he died by suicide in her car, leaving a note. She subsequently married and divorced director Charles Vidor, with the marriage lasting from 1943 to 1945. Her marriage to John Huston ran from July 23, 1946, to February 1950; during that union the couple adopted a twelve-year-old Mexican child named Pablo, whom Huston had encountered while filming The Treasure of the Sierra Madre on location in Mexico. Keyes later married bandleader Artie Shaw in 1957, and that marriage lasted until 1985.

Keyes authored three books: I Am a Billboard (1971), Scarlett O'Hara's Younger Sister (1977), and I'll Think about That Tomorrow (1991). In Scarlett O'Hara's Younger Sister she recounted her Hollywood relationships and described being sexually harassed by director Andrew Stone during the production of Say It in French. She also detailed her many love affairs, which included film producer Michael Todd and actors Glenn Ford, Sterling Hayden, Dick Powell, Anthony Quinn, David Niven, and Kirk Douglas. She further described regularly deflecting unwanted advances from Columbia studio head Harry Cohn throughout her tenure at the studio.

Keyes died of uterine cancer on July 4, 2008, at the Pepper Estates in Montecito, California, and was cremated. Half of her ashes were sent to Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, while the remainder were divided among relatives and interred in a family plot at Waco Baptist Church Cemetery in Waco, Georgia. Her tombstone bears the epitaph Gone with the Wind.