page_title: Tallulah Bankhead
section_title: Return to Broadway (1933–38)
hierarchical_section_title: Tallulah Bankhead / Career / Return to Broadway (1933–38)
caption_attribution_description: Actress Tallulah Bankhead Actress Tallulah Bankhead. January 25, 1934.
context_page_description: Tallulah Brockman Bankhead was an American actress of the stage and screen. Bankhead was a member of the Brockman Bankhead family, a prominent Alabama political family; her grandfather and uncle were U.S. Senators and her father served as an 11-term member of Congress, the final two as Speaker of the House of Representatives. Tallulah's support of liberal causes such as civil rights broke with the tendency of the Southern Democrats to support a more typically aligned agenda, and she often opposed her own family publicly.
  Primarily an actress of the stage, Bankhead did have one hit film—Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat —as well as a brief but successful career on radio. She later made appearances on television as well.
  In her personal life, Bankhead struggled with alcoholism and drug addiction, smoked around 120 cigarettes per day, and was known for her promiscuous sex life with both men and women; Bankhead also openly talked about her vices. She supported foster children and helped families escape the Spanish Civil War and World War II. She was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1972, and the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame in 1981.
context_section_description: Returning to Broadway, Bankhead worked steadily in a series of middling plays which were, ironically, later turned into highly successful Hollywood films starring other actresses. 1933's Forsaking All Others by Edward Barry Roberts and Frank Morgan Cavett — a romantic comedy-drama in which three friends sustain a love triangle lasting several years — was a modest success for Bankhead, running 110 performances, but the 1934 film version with Joan Crawford was one of that year's bigger financial and critical successes. Similarly, Bankhead's next two short-lived plays, Jezebel by Owen Davis and Dark Victory by George Brewer Jr. and Bertram Bloch, were both transformed into high-profile, prestigious film vehicles for Bette Davis. 
  But Bankhead persevered, even through ill health. In 1933, while performing in Jezebel, Bankhead nearly died following a five-hour emergency hysterectomy due to gonorrhea, which she claimed she had contracted from George Raft. Weighing only 70 lb (32 kg) when she left the hospital, she vowed to continue her promiscuous and party lifestyle, stoically saying to her doctor "Don't think this has taught me a lesson!"
  Bankhead continued to play in various Broadway performances over the next few years, gaining excellent notices for her portrayal of Elizabeth in a revival of Somerset Maugham's The Circle.  However, when she appeared in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra with her then-husband John Emery, the New York Evening Post critic John Mason Brown memorably carped "Tallulah Bankhead barged down the Nile last night as Cleopatra – and sank."
  From 1936 to 1938, David O. Selznick, producer of Gone with the Wind (1939) called Bankhead the "first choice among established stars" to play Scarlett O'Hara in the upcoming film. Although her 1938 screen test for the role in black-and-white was superb, she photographed poorly in Technicolor. Selznick also reportedly believed that at age 36, she was too old to play Scarlett, who is 16 at the beginning of the film (the role eventually went to Vivien Leigh). Selznick sent Kay Brown to Bankhead to discuss the possibility of Bankhead playing prostitute Belle Watling in the film, which she turned down.
caption: Bankhead in 1934
exif: {}