Frances Farmer

Frances Elena Farmer was born on September 19, 1913, in Seattle, Washington, to Ernest Melvin Farmer, a lawyer, and Cora Lillian Farmer, a boardinghouse operator and dietician. Her father was originally from Spring Valley, Minnesota, and her mother was an Oregon native descended from pioneers. Farmer had an older sister, Edith, an older brother, Wesley, and an older half-sister, Rita, from her mother's first marriage. When Farmer was four, her parents separated and her mother relocated with the children to Los Angeles, where her sister Zella lived. The family later moved to Chico, California, before the children were sent back to Seattle to live with their father. Lillian and Ernest divorced in the fall of 1929, when Farmer was sixteen.

During her senior year at West Seattle High School in 1931, Farmer developed a mentoring relationship with her English teacher, Belle McKenzie. An essay Farmer had written for a class project, titled "God Dies," was entered by McKenzie in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and won first prize of one hundred dollars, though it generated controversy among Seattle newspapers and local church groups who characterized it as a declaration of atheism. Farmer later described it in her autobiography as an attempt, influenced by her reading of Friedrich Nietzsche, to reconcile her wish for a "superfather" God with her observations of a chaotic world.

After graduating from high school, Farmer enrolled at the University of Washington, initially majoring in journalism and working multiple jobs to pay her tuition, including as an usherette, a waitress, a tutor, a laborer in a soap factory, and a singing waitress at Mount Rainier National Park. During her sophomore year she came under the influence of university drama instructor Sophie Rosenstein, who persuaded her to change her major to drama and mentored her in a succession of stage productions, including Euripides' Helen of Troy, the morality play Everyman, and Chekhov's Uncle Vanya.

Following her graduation from the University of Washington, Farmer moved into stock theater before signing a film contract with Paramount Pictures on her twenty-second birthday in September 1935. Her film debut came in the 1936 B picture Too Many Parents, followed by another B film, Border Flight. She was subsequently given the lead role opposite Bing Crosby in the musical Western Rhythm on the Range in 1936. Dissatisfied with the opportunities Paramount offered her, Farmer left the studio and returned to stage work in 1937.

Her Broadway career spanned 1937 to 1939. She appeared in the comedy Thunder and was cast in the original Broadway production of Clifford Odets's Golden Boy, staged by New York City's Group Theatre. Farmer also appeared in Quiet City. Two of her Broadway productions were directed by Elia Kazan in 1939. A battle with depression and binge drinking led her to withdraw from a subsequent stage adaptation of an Ernest Hemingway work.

Farmer returned to Los Angeles and took supporting roles in the 1941 comedy World Premiere and the film noir Among the Living, both released that year. Beginning in 1942, reports of erratic behavior became public, and following several arrests and committals to psychiatric institutions, she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. At the request of her family, particularly her mother, Farmer was committed to a state-run institution in Washington, where she remained a patient until 1950. The conditions she reportedly endured there became the subject of significant controversy and speculation.

After her release, Farmer attempted an acting comeback, appearing primarily as a television host in Indianapolis on her own series, Frances Farmer Presents. Her final film role came in the 1958 drama The Party Crashers. Through much of the 1960s she performed occasionally in local theater productions staged by Purdue University. In the spring of 1970 she was diagnosed with esophageal cancer and died on August 1, 1970, at the age of fifty-six.

In the decade following her death, Farmer became the subject of two widely discussed books centered on her years of institutionalization. Will There Really Be a Morning?, published in 1972, was an autobiography partially ghostwritten by a friend in which she described consistent physical abuse during her commitment. Seattle journalist William Arnold subsequently investigated those claims for his 1978 novel Shadowland, in which he constructed a broader account of her commitment and alleged mistreatment. The two books presented sharply different portrayals of Farmer but together generated intense posthumous interest in her life, resulting over the following four decades in three feature films, eight stage plays, and numerous popular songs, among them Kurt Cobain's 1993 song "Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle."