page_title: Ona Munson
section_title: 1930–1940: Move to Hollywood
hierarchical_section_title: Ona Munson / Life and career / 1930–1940: Move to Hollywood
caption_attribution_description: English: Ona Munson in Gone with the Wind - publicity still (original image cropped&#160;: see source)
context_page_description: Ona Munson was an American film and stage actress. She starred in nine Broadway productions and 20 feature films in her career, which spanned over 30 years.
  Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, Munson began her stage career in New York theater in 1919, debuting on Broadway in George White's Scandals. She starred in another four Broadway plays and musicals before the end of the 1920s. In 1930, she moved to Los Angeles to embark on a career in film, but after appearing as leads in several films, such as Going Wild and The Hot Heiress, she returned to Broadway, starring in several productions, including Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts.
  Munson resumed her film career in the late 1930s, and was cast as madam Belle Watling in David O. Selznick's Gone with the Wind, a role which became her most famous. She starred in numerous films for Warner Bros. in the 1940s, but was often typecast based on her performance in Gone with the Wind, appearing again as a Chinese madam in the film noir The Shanghai Gesture.
  Munson married painter Edward Berman in 1950, her second husband after a five-year marriage to actor Edward Buzzell.
context_section_description: Munson moved to Los Angeles in 1930, and appeared in the Warner Bros. movie Going Wild. Originally, this film was intended as a musical, but all the numbers were removed before release owing to the public's distaste for musicals, which virtually saturated the cinema in 1929-30. The following year, she divorced Buzzell. After the divorce, Munson had a brief affair with filmmaker Ernst Lubitsch before his marriage to Vivian Gaye.
  Munson appeared the next year in The Hot Heiress, in which she sings several songs along with her co-star Ben Lyon. She also starred in Broadminded (1931) and Five Star Final (1931). After completing these films, Munson returned to New York and resumed her theater career, starring in Broadway productions of Hold Your Horses (1933), followed by Petticoat Fever and  Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts (both staged in 1935), in the latter of which she portrayed Regina Engstrand. During rehearsals for Ghosts, Munson had a short-lived romantic affair with actress Alla Nazimova, which ended before the play's premiere. Co-star Harry Ellerbe stated that the couple had "parted amicably."
  Munson returned to Los Angeles in 1938 to appear a minor part in His Exciting Night, followed by an uncredited role in Dramatic School. When David O. Selznick began casting his production Gone with the Wind, he first announced that Mae West was to play Belle, but both West and Tallulah Bankhead refused the role as too small. Munson was the antithesis of the voluptuous Belle: freckled and of slight build—but Selznick cast her in the role. 
  Munson’s career was stalemated by the acclaim of Gone with the Wind; for the remainder of her career, she was typecast in similar roles. In 1940, Munson had an affair with playwright Mercedes de Acosta while working for Republic Pictures in Los Angeles. Their affair was intense, with Munson once writing to Acosta in a letter: "I long to hold you in my arms and pour my love into you."
caption: Munson as Belle Watling in Gone With the Wind (1939)
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