Tallulah Bankhead

Tallulah Bankhead

Active - 1919 - 2004  |   Born - Jan 31, 1902 in Huntsville, Alabama, United States  |   Died - Dec 12, 1968   |   Genres - Drama, Comedy, Fantasy

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Biography by AllMovie

Seductive, whiskey-voiced, one-of-a-kind American leading lady Tallulah Bankhead, the daughter of the Speaker of the House of Representatives William Brockman Bankhead, began her stage career at age 15 after being educated in a convent. She did more stage work plus two silent films, then went to London in 1923 where she became a celebrity while performing brilliantly in a string of plays. The hot-blooded Bankhead preferred to live dangerously and became notorious for her uninhibited behavior (such as taking off her clothes in public), a tendency many have seen as detrimental to the use of her considerable talents. She appeared in two British silents before coming to America in 1930; signed by Paramount, she began her movie career in earnest but remained more a fixture of Broadway, where she shone in plays such as The Little Foxes (for which she won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award in 1939, an award she won again in 1942 for The Skin of Our Teeth). Her movie career was spotty and included several box office disasters, perhaps because her extravagant, larger-than-life personality was not done justice on the screen; her more memorable appearances include a celebrated performance in Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944), for which she was cited by New York Film Critics. Bankhead made only three more films after Lifeboat. She is divorced from actor John Emery. In 1952, she wrote her autobiography, Tallulah.

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Factsheet

  • Mother died of blood poisoning three weeks after Tallulah's birth.
  • Was named after her paternal grandmother, who was named after Tallulah Falls, Georgia.
  • In 1920s London, she would often get lost driving in the city, so she would hail a taxi and pay a cabbie to drive to a destination while she followed behind in her car.
  • Father was Speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1936 to 1940, and her uncle and grandfather were U.S. Senators.
  • Was considered for the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind.
  • In the 1940s, she had a pet lion named Winston Churchill.
  • In 1949, she sued, and won, a case against a beauty-care corporation, two radio networks and an ad agency when her name was used, without her permission, in a jingle for a hair shampoo.
  • Published her autobiography, Tallulah, in 1952.
  • One of her final public appearance was on The Tonight Show in May 1968, where she chatted with fellow guests John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
  • Inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame in 1981.
  • Has been the subject of theatrical productions including the 1991 musical Tallulah Who? and the 2010 Broadway play Looped.