norma desmond

Description

The High Hatters conducted by Leonard Joy, Vocal refrain by Chick Bullock - Come To Me (DeSylva --Brown-Henderson) Fox Trot from the United Artists picture "Indiscreet", Victor 1931 (USA) NOTE: Gloria SWANSON (née Gloria Svensson in 1899, Chicago IL, d. 1983 in NYC). Her father was a soldier and he was Swedish, her mother Adelajda Klanowska was Polish. Although born in Chicago because of her father's attachment to the Army, they moved frequently and she went to public schools in Chicago; Key West, Florida; and San Juan, Puerto Rico. It was not her intention to enter show business, but on a whim one of her aunts took her to a small film company in Chicago and Gloria was asked to come back to work as an extra. After a few months as an extra working with among others, Charlie Chaplin, and making $13.50 a week, she left school to work full time at the studio. Soon, her parents separated and she and her mother moved to California. Her film debut was as in The Fable of Elvira and Farina and the Meal Ticket (1915). From the following year on, she had leading roles in pictures for Keystone, then a year with Triangle, and, in 1919, a contract with Cecil B. DeMille. DeMille transformed her from a typical Mack Sennett comedienne into a lively, provocative, even predatory, star. She collected husbands (e.g., the indigent Henri de la Falaise) and lovers (e.g., Joseph P. Kennedy, father of former President John F. Kennedy). Kennedy produced her Queen Kelly (1929), directed by Erich von Stroheim. It was von Stroheim's copy of this film that Swanson was watching as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (1950) when she leaped into the projection beam shouting, "Have they forgotten what a star looks like? I'll be up there again, so help me!". She survived the switch to talkies, even learning how to sing for Music in the Air (1934), but her kinds of films were over with by that time. She returned to the stage in the 1940s ("Reflected Glory," "Let us Be Gay," "A Goose for a Gander"). She was a clothes designer and artist; she founded Essence of Nature Cosmetics; and she made television appearances through the 1960s and 1970s, doing cameos and pushing health foods. Her masterpiece role guaranteeing her immortality in history of the cinema, was Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard - American film noir directed and co-written by Billy Wilder (1950).