Gloria Grahame might be best remembered as the quasi-floozy who flirts briefly with Jimmy Stewart's George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life (when George compliments her dress, Violet responds, "Why, this old thing? I only wear it when I don't care how I look").
Never quite a major star, she had a solid career as a femme fatale, teaming up with Humphrey Bogart in In a Lonely Place (1950). She won the Academy Award for best supporting actress for 1952's The Bad and the Beautiful, a film that allowed her just nine minutes of screen time, at that point the shortest performance on screen to win an acting Oscar. (Beatrice Straight beat the record in 1977 when she won for playing William Holden's long-suffering wife in Network; she was on screen for less than six minutes.)
Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool
83 Cast: Annette Bening, Jamie Bell, Vanessa Redgrave, Julie Walters, Kenneth Cranham, Stephen Graham, Frances Barber, Leanne Best
Director: Paul McGuigan
Rating: R, for language, some sexual content and brief nudity
Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes
But by 1978, Grahame's career had faded, in part due to rumors of haughty behavior while on the set of Oklahoma! (1955) and naughty behavior with the 13-year-old son of her second husband, Nicolas Ray (the boy grew up to be her fourth husband) -- and she mostly worked in television, where she specialized in older versions of the tarnished beauties she portrayed in '50s noirs.
She was living in a London boarding house while she worked in stage productions. That was where she met Peter Turner, a 26-year-old British actor with whom she conducted an affair until her death at 57 in 1981. In 1986, Turner published a memoir of the affair, and now that book has been turned into a movie starring Annette Bening as Grahame and Jamie Bell as Turner.
Paul McGuigan (Gangster No. 1, Wicker Park), who has mostly worked the same violent British mobster vein as Guy Ritchie, handles the potentially bathetic material in Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool with some delicacy. He employs a broken chronology to great effect, cutting from gray London to sunnier days in Los Angeles and New York and back again. Grahame's affair with Turner unfolds naturally in working class pubs and cinemas, with an easy chemistry between the two. It's not hard to understand what the young actor sees in the older woman -- after all, she's played by Bening.
But then Grahame gets sick and winds up in the tender care of Turner's parents, Bella (Julie Walters) and Joe (Kenneth Cranham), in their drab council house in Liverpool. Neither she nor the movie ever recovers.
That said, Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool is a slight and sad movie, if not quite a depressing one. It mirrors real life in that we might wish Bening and Bell had a little more time together, for both are excellent in roles that could have defaulted to cliche. McGuigan allows his characters their dignity, and his actors the opportunity to suggest rich inner lives for their creations.
MovieStyle on 03/30/2018