Gene Tierney

Gene Eliza Tierney was born on November 19, 1920, in Brooklyn, New York, to Howard Sherwood Tierney, a successful insurance broker of Irish descent, and Belle Lavinia Taylor, a former physical education instructor. She had an elder brother and a younger sister. Tierney attended St. Margaret's School for Girls in Waterbury, Connecticut, and Unquowa School in Fairfield, Connecticut, before spending two years in Europe at Brillantmont International School in Lausanne, Switzerland, where she became fluent in French. Upon returning to the United States in 1936, she enrolled at Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Connecticut. During a family visit to Warner Bros. studios on the West Coast, director Anatole Litvak encouraged the seventeen-year-old to pursue acting. The studio offered her a contract, but her parents declined, citing the low salary and their preference that she maintain her social standing.

Tierney's formal society debut took place on September 24, 1938. Finding that life unfulfilling, she turned to the stage. Her father supported the decision with the condition that she begin in the legitimate theatre, and she subsequently studied acting with Broadway actor and director Benno Schneider at a small Greenwich Village studio. She became a protégée of Broadway producer-director George Abbott. Her earliest Broadway appearances included carrying a bucket of water across the stage in What a Life! and working as an understudy in The Primrose Path, both in 1938.

Tierney's verified Broadway career spanned 1939 to 1940 and encompassed three productions. In 1939 she played Molly O'Day in Mrs. O'Brien Entertains, a role New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson described as her first stage performance, noting her as pretty and refreshingly modest. That same year she appeared as Peggy Carr in Ring Two, drawing favorable notices from critic Richard Watts Jr. of the New York Herald Tribune. Columbia Pictures signed her to a six-month contract in 1939, but when the studio failed to find her a suitable project, she returned to Broadway. In 1940 she starred as Patricia Stanley in The Male Animal, earning critical and commercial success. Atkinson again reviewed her work in the Times, writing that she blazed with animation in the best performance she had yet given. The production made her a prominent figure in New York before she had reached her twentieth birthday, and she was featured in Life magazine and photographed for Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, and Collier's Weekly.

It was during the run of The Male Animal that Darryl F. Zanuck, head of 20th Century Fox, reportedly attended a performance and later encountered Tierney at the Stork Club, initially not realizing the woman on the dance floor was the same actress he had seen onstage. Tierney subsequently signed with 20th Century Fox and made her film debut in a supporting role in Fritz Lang's western The Return of Frank James in 1940, opposite Henry Fonda. She went on to appear in a succession of Fox productions throughout the early 1940s, including Tobacco Road, Son of Fury: The Story of Benjamin Blake, and Heaven Can Wait, in which she received top billing opposite Ernst Lubitsch's direction.

Her most celebrated screen role came in Otto Preminger's film noir Laura in 1944, in which she played the title character Laura Hunt opposite Dana Andrews. The following year she portrayed the jealous and narcissistic Ellen Berent Harland in Leave Her to Heaven, adapted from a novel by Ben Ames Williams and co-starring Cornel Wilde. The performance earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress, and the film became 20th Century Fox's most commercially successful release of the decade. Director Martin Scorsese later cited it as one of his favorite films and assessed Tierney as one of the most underrated actresses of the Golden Era.

Tierney continued working steadily through the late 1940s and into the 1950s in films including The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Whirlpool, Night and the City, and The Mating Season. Her later film appearances included The Egyptian, The Left Hand of God, and The Pleasure Seekers in 1964, which marked her final film role. After her Hollywood career diminished, she made sporadic appearances in television productions. Her last work credit was a role in the miniseries Scruples in 1980. Gene Tierney died on November 6, 1991.