Marie Antoinette (1938) is one of our favorite movies, and it's not hard to tell why from these stills. Norma Shearer is just splendid as the doomed French queen, and despite all the M-G-M gloss, her final scenes are raw and heartbreaking.
We never particularly cared for Norma in our callow youth; she seemed less interesting than, say, her arch-rival Joan Crawford. Now that we're older and wiser, we adore her. Famously wed to producer Irving Thalberg during the height of her fame ("She was married to the boss, and I was just an actress," Crawford famously griped), the widowed Shearer's second marriage was to her children's dashingly handsome, 20-years-younger ski instructor, Martin Arrouge. Which is pretty darn fabulous.
You can see from the more casual snaps that she has a lazy eye that the studio glam photographers had to struggle to hide ("Turn your head to the right and look left sweeite.") and yet she was still fabulous.
ReplyDeleteThe acidic British actress Stella Campbell once "complimented" Shearer on her "beautiful, tiny, TI-NY eyes!" She was also a little cross-eyed, but yes... amazingly, still fabulous.
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