The 1940s film star was worshipped for her looks – but they were also a poisoned chalice when it came to her career and legacy. Nearly a century on, has the way we consider beauty changed all that much?
Female beauty is a concept that is coloured by power dynamics and symbolism. It has classical ideals, but ever-shifting goalposts, dependent on decade or era. And like so much that is feminine, it is also derided. Too much concern with beauty, in oneself or others, is often seen as frivolous, even while its social currency – and the fact of it still having currency – remain fascinating elements of Western culture and society. All of this to say: anyone in the public eye who is given the title of “the most beautiful woman” is handed something of a poisoned chalice.
Gene Tierney was one of many actresses in Hollywood, past and present, who have been so labelled, described as “unquestionably the most beautiful woman in movie history” by studio head Darryl Zanuck. Blessed with aqua-blue, cat-like eyes, and an unnervingly symmetrical face, she was almost doll-like in her appearance; an impression aided by the carefully painted red lips of her era. She became famous at the start of the 1940s, a time of the bombshell and the pin-up. If her contemporaries in Hollywood screen beauty were the likes of Rita Hayworth, Ava Gardner and Hedy Lamarr, it was certainly saying something that Tierney was consistently referred to as the most beautiful of them all.
In the British Film Institute’s April season Out of the Shadows: The Films of Gene Tierney, programmer Aga Baranowska seeks to highlight an actress whose work was overshadowed by this very fact. And by screening a variety of her lesser-seen films, it also raises some interesting questions about what the finite power of beauty does to the woman in possession of it when it’s projected on to a cinema screen.
Tierney’s career began at the start of 1940s when she was first contracted to 20th-Century Fox at 19. She came from a well-off family in Fairfield, Connecticut, where she had made her society debut aged 17, and it was, as she once noted, expected she would soon go off to marry a Yale boy. After some small parts on Broadway, her dazzling looks quickly attracted the attention of the studios, and her first major screen role came in 1942, with screwball comedy Rings on her Fingers, opposite Henry Fonda.
Publicity build-up almost always featured – and embellished – her high-society background, and her persona of coolly elegant, ladylike composure. But it didn’t quite disguise the fact that Fox often did not know what to do with Tierney. They spoke of her as a debutante but cast her in a revolving-door of parts in an attempt to figure out where she fit. Too sultry for comedy and too refined to seem low-born, the Irish-American even found herself cast in various racially ambiguous parts, with her skin intentionally darkened or her eyes elongated with makeup to give her the then-in-vogue (and deeply problematic) “exotic” look.
