Too Loose Tallulah

Today is the birthday of Tallulah Bankhead (1902-1968). I’ve always felt a special connection to her because she comes from my family’s hometown of Hunstville, Alabama. There the connection stops: her father was the Speaker of the House (that’s the U.S. House) and she was the granddaughter and niece of Senators.

While she had been a professional actress on the New York stage from the age of sixteen, a London and NY stage star from the age of 21, and later a star of radio and film as well, history has unfairly (though understandably) remembered her mostly for her offstage lifestyle, her huge appetite for booze, drugs, and indiscriminate sex, and her ribald witticisms.

As a mature actress, she created roles like Regina in The Little Foxes (1939), Sabina in (1942), and the newspaper lady in Alfred Hitchock’sLifeboat (1944). Her performance as Amanda in a revival of Noel Coward’sPrivate Live’s ran nearly two years. And we wrote about her final film Die, Die My Darling (1965) here.