Quick Facts
In full:
Edith Norma Shearer
Born:
August 1902, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Died:
June 12, 1983, Woodland Hills, California, U.S. (aged 80)
Awards And Honors:
Academy Award (1931)
Academy Award (1931): Actress in a Leading Role
Notable Family Members:
spouse Irving Thalberg
Married To:
Irving Thalberg (1927–1936 [his death])
Martin Arrouge (married 1942)
Movies/Tv Shows (Acted In):
"Marie Antoinette" (1938)
"He Who Gets Slapped" (1924)
"The Devil's Circus" (1926)
"Broken Barriers" (1924)
"Man and Wife" (1923)
"A Free Soul" (1931)
"Idiot's Delight" (1939)
"The Waning Sex" (1926)
"The Leather Pushers" (1922)
"Blue Water" (1924)
"The Trail of the Law" (1924)
"After Midnight" (1927)
"Lady of the Night" (1925)
"Let Us Be Gay" (1930)
"The Man Who Paid" (1922)
"Strangers May Kiss" (1931)
"A Slave of Fashion" (1925)
"Waking Up the Town" (1925)
"Channing of the Northwest" (1922)
"His Secretary" (1925)
"The Tower of Lies" (1925)
"The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg" (1927)
"A Clouded Name" (1923)
"Strange Interlude" (1932)
"The Trial of Mary Dugan" (1929)
"The End of the World" (1922)
"Private Lives" (1931)
"The Stealers" (1920)
"Pleasure Mad" (1923)
"The Divorcee" (1930)
"The Last of Mrs. Cheyney" (1929)
"Excuse Me" (1925)
"Broadway After Dark" (1924)
"Pretty Ladies" (1925)
"The Devil's Partner" (1923)
"Upstage" (1926)
"A Lady of Chance" (1928)
"Lucretia Lombard" (1923)
"Her Cardboard Lover" (1942)
"The Demi-Bride" (1927)
"Empty Hands" (1924)
"The Actress" (1928)
"The Wanters" (1923)
"Smilin' Through" (1932)
"Escape" (1940)
"The Snob" (1924)
"The Bootleggers" (1922)
"The Barretts of Wimpole Street" (1934)
"The Women" (1939)
"Romeo and Juliet" (1936)
"The Latest from Paris" (1928)
"Their Own Desire" (1929)
"The Wolf Man" (1923)
"The Hollywood Revue of 1929" (1929)
"We Were Dancing" (1942)
"Riptide" (1934)

Norma Shearer (born August 1902, Montreal, Quebec, Canada—died June 12, 1983, Woodland Hills, California, U.S.) was an American motion-picture actress known for her glamour, charm, sophistication, and versatility. Shearer was dubbed the “First Lady of the Screen” by MGM because of her marriage to Hollywood producer Irving G. Thalberg.

Shearer, who had been a child model, won a beauty contest at age 14. After her once-wealthy family lost everything during World War I, Shearer’s ambitious mother took Norma and her sister to New York City, hoping that success in show business would restore the family fortunes. Despite failing an audition for Florenz Ziegfeld’s Follies—Ziegfeld said she was too short and had fat legs and a cast in one eye—Shearer worked as a model and landed a few small roles in New York-based movies. She was an extra in The Flapper and D.W. Griffith’s Way Down East in 1920, although Griffith, like Ziegfeld, saw no future for her as an actress. That same year, Shearer landed her first feature role in The Stealers, which caught the attention of talent scout and future MGM vice president Irving Thalberg, who secured a five-year contract for Shearer with the studio in 1923. Shearer and Thalberg were married in 1927, after which Shearer had her pick of films, parts, costars, and directors, and she used this advantage to avoid being typecast. Like her husband, Shearer understood the importance of packaging and publicity and demanded perfection in every detail of her costumes, makeup, and scenes.

Neither the most beautiful nor the most talented actress on the MGM lot, Shearer withstood her share of criticism from those who felt she married into a career. “A face unclouded by thought,” was playwright Lillian Hellman’s assessment of Shearer’s screen presence, while the writer Anita Loos remarked, “It is to Irving’s credit that, by expert showmanship and a judicious choice of camera angles, he made a beauty and a star out of Mrs. Thalberg.” Nevertheless, audiences were charmed by Shearer’s ability to convey a playful sexuality while maintaining her characteristic poise and refinement. She was adept at playing dramatic, comic, romantic, and sometimes daring roles; in one of her most popular films, He Who Gets Slapped (1924), she played a circus rider opposite Lon Chaney. She made a smooth transition to talkies in The Trial of Mary Dugan (1929). In 1931 she starred with Clark Gable in A Free Soul and played opposite Robert Montgomery in the screen adaptation of Noël Coward’s Private Lives. She essayed biographical roles with her portrayals of Elizabeth Barrett in The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934) and the title role in Marie Antoinette (1938). At age 36 she played 13-year-old Juliet opposite Leslie Howard in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1936). Perhaps her best role was that of the central figure in George Cukor’s all-woman vehicle, the star-studded The Women (1939).

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Although Shearer had a modest impact as an actress, she received six Academy Award nominations in the span of her career, winning a best actress Oscar for her work in The Divorcee (1930) as a wife who seeks revenge on her unfaithful husband by divorcing him and then courting the affections of two other men. Produced before 1934, when the repressive Production Code was enforced, this lacklustre melodrama is most notable for its frank depiction of sex and marriage. The leading role, which had been turned down by Greta Garbo, was about to be offered to Joan Crawford when Shearer reportedly asked Thalberg for the role.

Shearer’s career faltered after Thalberg’s death from pneumonia in 1936. She turned down the leads in Gone with the Wind and Mrs. Miniver, worked out her contract at MGM, and retired in 1942. From then until her death in 1983, she made no appearances as an actress and was rarely seen in public.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaThis article was most recently revised and updated by Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Hollywood

district, Los Angeles, California, United States
Also known as: Tinseltown
Also called:
Tinseltown
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Hollywood, district within the city of Los Angeles, California, U.S., whose name is synonymous with the American film industry. Lying northwest of downtown Los Angeles, it is bounded by Hyperion Avenue and Riverside Drive (east), Beverly Boulevard (south), the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains (north), and Beverly Hills (west). Since the early 1900s, when moviemaking pioneers found in southern California an ideal blend of mild climate, much sunshine, varied terrain, and a large labor market, the image of Hollywood as the fabricator of tinseled cinematic dreams has been etched worldwide.

The first house in Hollywood was an adobe building (1853) on a site near Los Angeles, then a small city in the new state of California. Hollywood was laid out as a real-estate subdivision in 1887 by Harvey Wilcox, a prohibitionist from Kansas who envisioned a community based on his sober religious principles. Real-estate magnate H.J. Whitley, known as the “Father of Hollywood,” subsequently transformed Hollywood into a wealthy and popular residential area. At the turn of the 20th century, Whitley was responsible for bringing telephone, electric, and gas lines into the new suburb. In 1910, because of an inadequate water supply, Hollywood residents voted to consolidate with Los Angeles.

In 1908 one of the first storytelling movies, The Count of Monte Cristo, was completed in Hollywood after its filming had begun in Chicago. In 1911 a site on Sunset Boulevard was turned into Hollywood’s first studio, and soon about 20 companies were producing films in the area. In 1913 Cecil B. DeMille, Jesse Lasky, Arthur Freed, and Samuel Goldwyn formed Jesse Lasky Feature Play Company (later Paramount Pictures). DeMille produced The Squaw Man in a barn one block from present-day Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street, and more box-office successes soon followed.

Illustration of movie theater popcorn bucket, cinema ticket, clapboard, and film reel. (movies, hollywood, pop culture, 3D render)
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Hollywood had become the center of the American film industry by 1915 as more independent filmmakers relocated there from the East Coast. For more than three decades, from early silent films through the advent of “talkies,” figures such as D.W. Griffith, Goldwyn, Adolph Zukor, William Fox, Louis B. Mayer, Darryl F. Zanuck, and Harry Cohn served as overlords of the great film studios—Twentieth Century-Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount Pictures, Columbia Pictures, Warner Brothers, and others. Among the writers who were fascinated by Hollywood in its “golden age” were F. Scott Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, and Nathanael West.

After World War II, film studios began to move outside Hollywood, and the practice of filming “on location” emptied many of the famous lots and sound stages or turned them over to television show producers. With the growth of the television industry, Hollywood began to change, and by the early 1960s it had become the home of much of American network television entertainment.

Among the features of Hollywood, aside from its working studios, are the Hollywood Bowl (1919; a natural amphitheater used since 1922 for summertime concerts under the stars), the Greek Theatre in Griffith Park (also a concert venue), Grauman’s Chinese Theatre (with footprints and handprints of many stars in its concrete forecourt), and the Hollywood Wax Museum (with numerous wax figures of celebrities). The Hollywood Walk of Fame pays tribute to many celebrities of the entertainment industry. The most visible symbol of the district is the Hollywood sign that overlooks the area. First built in 1923 (a new sign was erected in 1978), the sign originally said “Hollywoodland” (to advertise new homes being developed in the area), but the sign fell into disrepair, and the “land” section was removed in the 1940s when the sign was refurbished.

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Many stars, past and present, live in neighboring communities such as Beverly Hills and Bel Air, and the Hollywood Forever Cemetery contains the crypts of such performers as Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, and Tyrone Power. Hollywood Boulevard, long a chic thoroughfare, became rather tawdry with the demise of old studio Hollywood, but it underwent regeneration beginning in the late 20th century; the Egyptian Theatre (built in 1922), for example, was fully restored in the 1990s and became the home of the American Cinematheque, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the presentation of the motion picture.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaThis article was most recently revised and updated by Encyclopaedia Britannica.