On this date in 1967, Blonde bombshell actress Jayne
Mansfield is killed when the car in which she is riding strikes the rear of a
trailer truck on Interstate-90 east of New Orleans, Louisiana.
Mansfield had been on her way to New Orleans from Biloxi,
Mississippi, where she had been performing a standing engagement at a local
nightclub; she had a television appearance scheduled the following day. Ronald
B. Harrison, a driver for the Gus Stevens Dinner Club, was driving Mansfield
and her lawyer and companion, Samuel S. Brody, along with three of Mansfield's
children with her ex-husband Mickey Hargitay, in Stevens' 1966 Buick Electra.
On a dark stretch of road, just as the truck was approaching a machine emitting
a thick white fog used to spray mosquitoes (which may have obscured it from
Harrison's view), the Electra hit the trailer-truck from behind. Mansfield,
Harrison and Brody were all killed in the accident. Eight-year-old Mickey,
six-year-old Zoltan and three-year-old Marie, or Mariska, had apparently been
sleeping on the rear seat; they were injured but survived.
Born Vera Jayne Palmer in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, Mansfield
arrived in Hollywood as a young wife and mother (to daughter Jayne Marie) in
1954, determined to become an actress. From the beginning, she wasn't afraid to
make the most of her assets, particularly her curvaceous figure, flowing
platinum blonde hair and dazzling smile. Cast in the Broadway comedy "Will
Success Spoil Rock Hunter?", she turned heads as a voluptuous, dumb blonde
movie star; in one famous scene she appeared in nothing but a white towel. She
famously appeared nude in the 1963 comedy "Promises! Promises!", and
stills from the set appeared in Playboy magazine, but her best
performance was generally believed to have been in 1957's "The Wayward
Bus," based on the John Steinbeck novel and costarring Joan Collins. While
her screen career amounted to about a dozen less-than-memorable films, off screen
she played the movie star role to perfection, and became one of the most
visible glamour girls of the era. In 1958, after her first marriage ended in
divorce, she married Hargitay, a former Mr. Universe; they divorced in 1963,
and Mansfield was married once more, to Matt Climber, in 1964. That marriage
also ended in divorce and she was awarded custody of their child, Octabiano.
Mariska Hargitay, injured in the accident that killed her mother, later
launched her own acting career, most memorably starring in the long-running
television drama "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit."
On this date in 2003, Katharine Hepburn, a four-time
Academy Award winner for Best Actress and one of the greatest screen legends of
Hollywood’s golden era, dies of natural causes at the age of 96, at her home in
Old Saybrook, Connecticut.
Hepburn was born into a well-to-do New England family,
the daughter of a prominent surgeon, Dr. Thomas Norval Hepburn, and his wife,
Katharine Houghton, a suffragist and birth control advocate. She graduated from
Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania in 1928 and became a stage actress; her role
in the 1932 Broadway production The Warrior’s Husband led to a Hollywood
screen test and a contract with RKO studios. In Hepburn’s debut film, A Bill
of Divorcement (1932), she starred opposite John Barrymore and was directed
by George Cukor, who would become her close friend and helm many of her films
(including 1933’s Little Women, 1935’s Sylvia Scarlett, 1938’s Holiday
and 1949’s Adam’s Rib).
Heralded as a fresh, unconventional beauty and a talented
actress, Hepburn won her first Best Actress Oscar for only her third film, Morning
Glory (1933). A string of films made with RKO had mixed degrees of success,
and Hepburn began earning a reputation as arrogant and self-absorbed on set,
though she was always meticulously prepared for her roles. She also refused to
play by the rules governing typical Hollywood starlets at the time, appearing
publicly in pantsuits and without makeup and refusing to sign autographs or
grant interviews. After modest successes with Stage Door (1937) and Bringing
Up Baby (1938), Hepburn decided to buy out her contract with RKO, a move
that gave her unusual control over her career for that time. Her faltering
image was revived by the success of The Philadelphia Story, which had originally
been written for Hepburn to play on Broadway and was then adapted into a hit
1940 movie co-starring Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart. Several years later,
Hepburn met the actor Spencer Tracy while co-starring with him in Woman of
the Year (1942). Though Tracy, a devout Catholic, remained married, the two
began a romantic relationship that would last until Tracy’s death nearly three
decades later (Hepburn had divorced her husband of six years, Ludlow Ogden
Smith, in 1934). On-screen, they acted in nine films together, including Adam’s
Rib (1949), Pat and Mike (1952) and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967).
Tracy died just weeks after shooting was completed on the last film, for which
Hepburn would win her second Best Actress Oscar.
Hepburn was awarded her third Oscar for her starring turn
in A Lion in Winter (1968). She continued to appear in films and on
television (including an Emmy-winning performance in 1976’s Love Among the
Ruins) throughout the next three decades, winning a fourth Best Actress statuette
for 1981’s On Golden Pond. Nominated for 12 Academy Awards in her
lifetime (a record that would stand until 2003, when Meryl Streep received her
13th nomination), Hepburn never attended the awards show to collect her honors
in person. In 1986, she broke her longtime silence about her relationship with
Tracy (his widow had died in 1983) in a televised tribute to the actor. She
read aloud a poignant letter she had written to him about his drinking and
about their last years together. She later included the letter in her
best-selling 1991 autobiography Me: Stories of My Life. In her final
screen appearance, in 1994’s Love Affair (a remake of the classic 1939
film), Hepburn appeared frail but composed as ever in her portrayal of the
aristocratic aunt of Warren Beatty’s character. In 1999, the American Film
Institute (AFI) named Hepburn as the greatest female actress in the history of
American cinema. When she died on June 29, 2003, the lights on Broadway were
dimmed for an hour to mark the passing of one of entertainment’s brightest
stars.
