She Was Hot

One of the nicest dreams ever offered by Hollywood is that death frees you. Not just from having to grapple in a tough, cruel world but, if you pass in your 80s or 90s, from a body that’s been sinking into physical decline. Death means you can be a kid again. This, at least, is a fantasy I considered when my father went a couple of years ago, and it’s what I’m thinking now that Titanic star Gloria Stuart has passed at age 100.

Jim Cameron was obviously charmed by the youth-regression idea — he used it for the finale of Titanic. The Four Poster, a 1952 romantic film with Rex Harrison and Lili Palmer, also went there. I haven’t seen it since the late ’70s, but Harrison and Palmer escape their wrinkled and withered bodies when they push off, and are free to be young lovers again.

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20 thoughts on “She Was Hot”

  1. A beautiful lady, very smart, a political activist in 1930s Hollywood (Screen Actors Guild, Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, etc.), leading lady of two John Ford movies (AIRMAIL and THE PRISONER OF SHARK ISLAND), among her many other accomplishments. And a part of Groucho Marx’s circle with one of her husbands, writer Arthur Sheekman. She also lived directly across the street from the Brentwood condo where Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were murdered but said she was asleep at the time and didn’t hear anything.

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  2. Very interesting woman, one of the few actors around who actually grew up in Santa Monica. And very charming in person. You knew this day was coming, but still sad. Yet, hers was a great life.

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  3. Born the same year that D. W. Griffith — possibly inspired by the undeservedly-forgotten Francis Boggs setting up a Los Angeles studio the previous year — went on the first filming expedition to a sleepy suburb of the city, called… Hollywood.

    R.I.P.

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  5. Rex Harrison starred in another film that features a similar finale…. in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, the elderly Gene Tierney sinks into her chair to die, only to rise up as a young woman and into Harrison’s waiting arms. Off they go, up into the clouds. Gets me every time.

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