Evelyn Keyes

Evelyn Louise Keyes was born on November 20, 1916, in Port Arthur, Texas, to Omar Dow Keyes and Maude Ollive Keyes. Her father, the son of a Methodist minister, died when Keyes was three years old, after which she and her mother relocated to Atlanta, Georgia, to live with her grandparents. As a teenager, Keyes took dancing lessons and performed for local organizations including the Daughters of the Confederacy. By age 18 she was working as a chorus girl, and she subsequently traveled to Hollywood, where she was introduced to Cecil B. DeMille, who signed her to a personal contract without requiring a screen test.

Following a series of B movies at Paramount Pictures, Keyes was cast in Say It in French (1938) but did not complete the film and was replaced by Olympe Bradna. She then auditioned for the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939). Although she did not win that part, producer David O. Selznick was impressed by her Southern accent and cast her in January 1939 as Scarlett's sister Suellen O'Hara, the role for which she became best known. Columbia Pictures subsequently signed her to a contract, and she spent much of the early 1940s in lead roles across the studio's B dramas and mysteries. In 1941 she appeared as an ingenue in Here Comes Mr. Jordan. Her most commercially successful Columbia credit came in 1946 opposite Larry Parks in The Jolson Story, a major box-office hit for the studio. She followed that with the screwball comedy The Mating of Millie alongside Glenn Ford, and in 1949 played Kathy Flannigan in Mrs. Mike, a film she later identified as her personal favorite among her work.

While still under contract at Columbia, Keyes had voiced dissatisfaction with the quality of roles the studio offered her. Director John Huston, then her estranged husband and a partner at Horizon Pictures with producer Sam Spiegel, arranged for her to star in the film noir thriller The Prowler (1951) alongside Van Heflin. Keyes 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 from film in 1956, though she continued to act in subsequent years. In 1972, Keyes appeared on Broadway in the musical No, No, Nanette.

Keyes was married four times. Her first husband, Barton Bainbridge, was an alcoholic who threatened her with a gun on at least one occasion; the couple separated, and in 1940 Bainbridge died by suicide in her car, leaving a note attributing his death to her departure. She later married director Charles Vidor, a union that lasted from 1943 to 1945, and then married John Huston on July 23, 1946, divorcing in February 1950. During her marriage to Huston, 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. Her fourth marriage was to bandleader Artie Shaw, which lasted from 1957 to 1985. In her memoir Scarlett O'Hara's Younger Sister: My Lively Life In and Out of Hollywood, Keyes recounted numerous personal relationships and described fending off repeated advances from Columbia studio head Harry Cohn throughout her tenure at the studio.

Keyes authored three books: I Am a Billboard (1971), Scarlett O'Hara's Younger Sister (1977), and I'll Think about That Tomorrow (1991). She 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, beneath a tombstone bearing the epitaph Gone with the Wind.