GENE TIERNEY!!!

After finishing Gene Tierney's frank and poignant memoir SELF PORTRAIT, I set about watching her flix. Her biography reads like a movie: Her lavish lifestyle as a young girl; Boarding School in Lusanne, Switzerland; Her early success as model and Broadway Actress; Her catapult to Film Stardom; Her tumultuous marriage to Count Oleg Cassini; The thieving father who plundered her bank account; The birth of a severely retarded and deaf daughter; The affair with Aly Kahn (who didn't have one with him back then?); And, ultimately, her very distressing bouts of the wackos! I could NOT put the darn thing down! Though not as good as RSVP by star-fucking gas bag Elsa Maxwell, it still made me wonder WHY nobody has ever made a bio-pic about Tierney? She really was the prototype for Grace Kelly, what with her elegant speech and swell carriage.

Here are few of her best:

In LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN, Tierney plays the ultimate in Deadly Jealous Wives. As Ellen Berent Harland, Tierney lights up a blazingly Technicolor screen. Cornell Wilde is her loving but confused (and very stiff) husband, Darryl Hickman, Wilde's younger polio stricken brother, Jeanne Craine, the long suffering younger cousin to Ellen. No one is spared Ellen's wrath. I LOVE her! Everything she wears is MONOGRAMED!!! Tierney was nominated for an Oscar, but lost to Joan Crawford, who could have played this role were she only 15 years younger.