Lana Turner

Lana Turner (February 8, 1921 – June 29, 1995) was an American actress. During her nearly 50-year career, she achieved fame as both a pin-up model and a film actress. In 1992, Turner was diagnosed with throat cancer and died of the disease three years later at age 74.

About Lana Turner in brief

Lana Turner (February 8, 1921 – June 29, 1995) was an American actress. During her nearly 50-year career, she achieved fame as both a pin-up model and a film actress. In the mid-1940s, she was one of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s biggest stars. Her films earned the studio more than USD 50 million during her 18-year contract with them. Turner is frequently cited as a popular culture icon of Hollywood glamour and a screen legend of classical Hollywood cinema. In 1992, Turner was diagnosed with throat cancer and died of the disease three years later at age 74. She was the only child of John Virgil Turner, a miner from Alabama of Dutch descent, and Mildred Frances Cowan from Lamar, Arkansas, who had English, Scottish and Irish ancestry. Her parents first met while Mildred, the daughter of a mine inspector, was visiting Picher, Oklahoma with her father, who was inspecting local mines there. Shortly after, the two eloped and moved west, settling in Idaho. Turner was known to family and friends as Judy. She expressed interest in performance at a young age, performing short dance routines at her father’s Elks chapter in Wallace. At age three, she performed an impromptu impromptu dance routine in a charity fashion show in which her mother was modeling. The Turner family struggled financially, and relocated to San Francisco when she was six years old. On December 14, 1930, her father won some money at a traveling craps game, stuffed his sock in his pocket and left for home.

He was later found bludgeoned to death on the edge of Minnesota and Mariposa Streets. His robbery and homicide were never solved, with his left shoe and sock missing, and his body found at the corner of Potrero Hill and Dogpatch District in San Francisco. Turner later said, “I know that my father’s sweetness and gaiety, his sense of gaiety and his warmth, have never been a far from me, and that his death had a profound effect on me” Her final starring role in Madame X earned her a David di Donatello Award for Best Foreign Actress. In 1982, she accepted a much-publicized and lucrative recurring guest role in the television series Falcon Crest, which afforded the series notably high ratings. In 1958, her teenage daughter Cheryl Crane stabbed Turner’s lover Johnny Stompanato to death in their home during a domestic struggle. Turner’s reputation as a glamorous femme fatale was enhanced by her critically acclaimed performance in the noir The Postman Always Rings Twice, a role which established her as a serious dramatic actress. Her popularity continued through the 1950s in dramas such as The Bad and the Beautiful and Peyton Place, the latter for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for best actress. Turner spent most of the 1970s and early 1980s in semi-retirement, making her final film appearance in 1980.

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