Background and career
Julia Jean "Lana" Turner ( LAH-nə; February 8, 1921 – June 29, 1995) was an American actress. Over a career spanning nearly five decades, she achieved fame as both a pin-up model and a film actress, as well as for her highly publicized personal life. In the mid-1940s, she was one of the highest-paid American actresses, and one of MGM's biggest stars, with her films earning over one billion dollars in 2026 currency for the studio during her 18-year contract with them. Turner is frequently cited as a popular culture icon due to her glamorous persona, and a screen legend of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Born to working-class parents in Idaho, Turner spent her childhood there before her family relocated to California. In 1936, at the age of 15, she was discovered by a talent scout, while shopping at the Top Hat malt shop in Hollywood. At the age of 16, she was signed to a personal contract by Warner Bros. director Mervyn LeRoy, who took her with him when he transferred to MGM in 1938. She soon attracted attention by playing a murder victim in her screen debut, LeRoy's film They Won't Forget (1937), and she later moved into supporting roles that often cast her as an ingénue. During the early 1940s, Turner established herself as a leading lady, and one of MGM's top stars, appearing in such films as the film noir Johnny Eager (1941), the musical Ziegfeld Girl (1941), the horror Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941), and the romantic war drama Somewhere I'll Find You (1942), the latter being one of several films in which she starred opposite Clark Gable. Her reputation as a glamorous femme fatale was enhanced by her critically acclaimed performance in the film noir The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), a role which established her as a serious dramatic actress. Her popularity continued through the 1950s, in dramas such as The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) and Peyton Place (1957), the latter for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress. In 1958, intense media scrutiny surrounded Turner when her lover, Johnny Stompanato, was stabbed to death by her teenage daughter, Cheryl Crane, during a domestic struggle in their home. Her next film, Imitation of Life (1959), proved to be one of the greatest commercial successes of her career, and her starring role in Madame X (1966) earned her a David di Donatello Award for Best Foreign Actress. She spent most of the 1970s in semi-retirement, making her final film appearance in 1980. She accepted a much-publicized, and lucrative, recurring guest role in the television series Falcon Crest in 1982, with the series subsequently garnering high ratings. She was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1992, and died three years later, at the age of 74.
Julia Jean Turner was born on February 8, 1921, at Providence Hospital in Wallace, Idaho. She was the only child of Mildred Frances Cowan, who hailed from Lamar, Arkansas, and John Virgil Turner, a miner from Montgomery, Alabama. Her mother had English, Irish, and Scottish ancestry, while her father was of Dutch descent. She was born four days before her mother's 17th birthday. Her parents had first met while her mother was 14 and her father was 24; Mildred was the daughter of a mine inspector and was visiting Picher, Oklahoma, a trip that was taken so her father could inspect the mines there. Mildred's father objected to the courtship, but she and John eloped and moved west before settling in Idaho. The family lived in Burke, Idaho, at the time of Turner's birth, and relocated to nearby Wallace in 1925, where her father opened a dry cleaning service and worked in the local silver mines. As a child, Turner was known to family and friends as Judy. She expressed interest in performance at a young age, performing short dance routines at her father's Elks chapter in Wallace. When she was three, she performed an impromptu dance routine at a charity fashion show in which her mother was modeling. The Turner family struggled financially and relocated to San Francisco when she was six years old, after which her parents separated. On December 14, 1930, her father won some money at a traveling craps game; he stuffed his winnings in his sock and headed home, but was later found bludgeoned to death on the corner of Minnesota and Mariposa Streets, on the edge of San Francisco's Potrero Hill and the Dogpatch District, with his left shoe and sock missing. His robbery and homicide were never solved, and his death had a profound effect on Turner, who was only nine years old at the time. She later said, "I know that my father's sweetness and gaiety, his warmth and his tragedy, have never been far from me. That, and a sense of loss and of growing up too fast." Turner sometimes lived with family friends or acquaintances so that her impoverished mother could save money. They also frequently moved, for a time living in Sacramento and throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. Following her father's death, Turner lived for a period in Modesto with a family who physically abused her and "treated her like a servant". Her mother worked 80 hours per week as a beautician to support herself and her daughter, and Turner recalled sometimes "living on crackers and milk for half a week". While baptized a Protestant at birth, Turner attended Mass with the Hislops, a Catholic family with whom her mother had temporarily boarded her in Stockton, California. She became "thrilled" by the ritual practices of the church, and when she was seven, her mother allowed her to formally convert to Roman Catholicism. Turner subsequently attended the Convent of the Immaculate Conception in San Francisco, hoping to become a nun. In the mid-1930s, Turner's mother developed respiratory problems and was advised by her doctor to move to a drier climate, upon which the two moved to Los Angeles in 1936.
Turner's discovery is considered a show-business legend and part of Hollywood mythology among film and popular cultural historians. One version of the story erroneously has her discovery occurring at Schwab's Pharmacy, which Turner claimed was the result of a reporting error that began circulating in articles published by columnist Sidney Skolsky. By Turner's own account, she was a 16-year-old junior at Hollywood High School when she skipped a typing class and bought a Coca-Cola at the Top Hat Malt Shop located on the southeast corner of Sunset Boulevard and McCadden Place. While in the shop, she was spotted by William R. Wilkerson, publisher of The Hollywood Reporter. Wilkerson was attracted by her beauty and physique, and asked her if she was interested in appearing in films, to which she responded: "I'll have to ask my mother first." With her mother's permission, Turner was referred by Wilkerson to the actor/comedian/talent agent Zeppo Marx. In December 1936, Marx introduced Turner to film director Mervyn LeRoy, who signed her to a $50 weekly contract with Warner Bros. on February 22, 1937 ($1,120 in 2025 dollars ). She soon became a protégée of LeRoy, who suggested that she take the stage name Lana Turner, a name she legally adopted several years later.
Turner made her feature film debut in LeRoy's They Won't Forget (1937), a crime drama in which she played a teenage murder victim. Though Turner only appeared on screen for a few minutes, Wilkerson wrote in The Hollywood Reporter that her performance was "worthy of more than a passing note". The film earned her the nickname of the "Sweater Girl" for her form-fitting attire, which accentuated her bust. Turner always detested the nickname, and upon seeing a sneak preview of the film, she recalled being profoundly embarrassed and "squirming lower and lower" into her seat. She stated that she had "never seen myself walking before… [It was] the first time [I was] conscious of my body." Several years after the film's release, Modern Screen journalist Nancy Squire wrote that Turner "made a sweater look like something Cleopatra was saving for the next visiting Caesar". Shortly after completing They Won't Forget, she made an appearance in James Whale's historical comedy The Great Garrick (1937), a biographical film about British actor David Garrick, in which she had a small role portraying an actress posing as a chambermaid. In late 1937, LeRoy was hired as an executive at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), and asked Jack L. Warner to allow Turner to relocate with him to MGM. Warner obliged, as he believed Turner would not "amount to anything". Turner left Warner Bros. and signed a contract with MGM for $100 a week ($2,240 in 2025 dollars ). The same year, she was loaned to United Artists for a minor role as a maid in The Adventures of Marco Polo. Her first starring role for MGM was scheduled to be an adaptation of The Sea-Wolf, co-starring Clark Gable, but the project was eventually shelved. Instead, she was assigned opposite teen idol Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in the Andy Hardy film Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938). During the shoot, Turner completed her studies with an educational social worker, allowing her to graduate high school that year. The film was a box-office success, and her appearance in it as a flirtatious high school student convinced studio head Louis B. Mayer that Turner could be the next Jean Harlow, a sex symbol who had died six months before Turner's arrival at MGM.
Mayer helped further Turner's career by giving her roles in several youth-oriented films in the late 1930s, such as the comedy Rich Man, Poor Girl (1938) in which she played the sister of a poor woman romanced by a wealthy man, and Dramatic School (1938), in which she portrayed Mado, a troubled drama student. In the former, she was billed as the "Kissing Bug from the Andy Hardy film". Upon completing Dramatic School, Turner screen-tested unsuccessfully for the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939). She was then cast in a supporting part as a "sympathetic bad girl" in Calling Dr. Kildare (1939), MGM's second entry in the Dr. Kildare series. This was followed by These Glamour Girls (1939), a comedy in which she portrayed a taxi dancer invited to attend a dance with a male student at his elite college. Turner's onscreen sex appeal in the film was reflected by a review in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in which she was characterized as "the answer to 'oomph'". In her next film, Dancing Co-Ed (1939), Turner was given first billing portraying Patty Marlow, a professional dancer who enters a college as part of a rigged national talent contest. The film was a commercial success, and led to Turner appearing on the cover of Look magazine.
In February 1940, Turner garnered significant publicity when she eloped to Las Vegas with 28-year-old bandleader Artie Shaw, her co-star in Dancing Co-Ed. Though they had only briefly known each other, Turner recalled being "stirred by his eloquence", and after their first date, the two spontaneously decided to get married. Their marriage lasted only four months but was highly publicized and led MGM executives to grow concerned over Turner's "impulsive behavior". Turner later remarked that Shaw "stirred" her but soon "flew into rages", adding, "He was a very intelligent man, but he didn't treat women well.” In the spring of 1940, after the two divorced, Turner discovered she was pregnant and traveled to Hawaii to receive a secret abortion at the insistence of studio executives. The procedure was performed in Turner's hotel room without anesthesia by a doctor whose $500 pay came from money deducted from Turner's paycheck. In contemporaneous press, it was noted she had been hospitalized for "exhaustion". She would later recall that Shaw treated her "like an untutored blonde savage, and took no pains to conceal his opinion". In the midst of her marriage to Shaw, she starred in We Who Are Young, a drama in which she played a woman who, against their employer's policy, marries her co-worker. In 1940, Turner appeared in her first musical film, Two Girls on Broadway, in which she received top billing over established co-stars Joan Blondell and George Murphy. A remake of The Broadway Melody, the film was marketed as featuring Turner's "hottest, most daring role". The following year, she had a lead role in her second musical, Ziegfeld Girl, opposite James Stewart, Judy Garland and Hedy Lamarr. In the film, she portrayed Sheila Regan, an alcoholic aspiring actress based on Lillian Lorraine. Ziegfeld Girl marked a personal and professional shift for Turner; she claimed it as the first role that got her "interested in acting", and the studio, impressed by her performance, marketed the film as featuring her in "the best role of the biggest picture to be released by the industry's biggest company". The film's high box-office returns elevated Turner's profitability, and MGM gave her a weekly salary raise to $1,500 as well as a personal makeup artist and trailer ($34,471 in 2025 dollars ). After completing the film, Turner and co-star Garland remained lifelong friends, and lived in houses next to one another in the 1950s. Following the success of Ziegfeld Girl, Turner took a supporting role as an ingénue in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941) – a sanitized remake of the original pre-Code film from a decade earlier – remade as a Freudian-influenced horror film, opposite Spencer Tracy and Ingrid Bergman. MGM had initially cast Turner in the lead, but Tracy specifically requested Bergman for the part. The studio recast Turner in the smaller role, though she was still given top billing. While the film was financially successful at the box office, Time magazine panned it, calling it "a pretentious resurrection of Robert Louis Stevenson's ghoulish classic ... As for Lana Turner, fully clad for a change, and the rest of the cast ... they are as wooden as their roles." Turner was then cast in the Western Honky Tonk (1941), the first of four films in which she would star opposite Clark Gable. The Turner-Gable films' successes were often heightened by gossip-column rumors about a relationship between the two. In January 1942, she began shooting her second picture with Gable, titled Somewhere I'll Find You; however, the production was halted for several weeks after the death of Gable's wife, Carole Lombard, in a plane crash. Meanwhile, the press continued to fuel rumors that Turner and Gable were romantic offscreen, which Turner vehemently denied. "I adored Mr. Gable, but we were [just] friends", she later recalled. "When six o'clock came, he went his way and I went mine." Her next project was Johnny Eager (1941), a violent mobster film in which she portrayed a socialite. James Agee of Time magazine was critical of co-star Robert Taylor's performance and noted: "Turner is similarly handicapped: Metro has swathed her best assets in a toga, swears that she shall become an actress, or else. Under these adverse circumstances, stars Taylor and Turner are working under wraps."
