Mary Astor had an affair with playwright George S Kaufman and was branded an adulterous wife by her former husband during a custody fight over their daughter.
64 Facts About Mary Astor
2.
Mary Astor was a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract player through most of the 1940s and continued to work in film, television and on stage until her retirement in 1964.
3.
Mary Astor's autobiography was a bestseller, as was her later book, A Life on Film, which was about her career.
4.
Mary Astor was born in Quincy, Illinois, the only child of Otto Ludwig Langhanke and Helen Marie de Vasconcellos.
5.
Mary Astor's German father emigrated to the United States from Berlin in 1891 and became a naturalized US citizen; her American mother was born in Jacksonville, Illinois, and had Portuguese roots.
6.
Mary Astor was home-schooled in academics and was taught to play the piano by her father, who insisted she practice daily.
7.
In 1919, Mary Astor sent a photograph of herself to a beauty contest in Motion Picture Magazine, becoming a semifinalist.
8.
When Mary Astor was 15, the family moved to Chicago, Illinois, with her father teaching German in public schools.
9.
Mary Astor took drama lessons and appeared in various amateur stage productions.
10.
Mary Astor managed her affairs from September 1920 to June 1930.
11.
The Albin photographs were seen by Harry Durant of Famous Players-Lasky and Mary Astor was signed to a six-month contract with Paramount Pictures.
12.
Mary Astor's name was changed to Mary Astor during a conference among Paramount Pictures chief Jesse Lasky, film producer Walter Wanger, and gossip columnist Louella Parsons.
13.
Mary Astor made her debut at age 14 in the 1921 film Sentimental Tommy, but her small part in a dream sequence wound up on the cutting room floor.
14.
Mary Astor then appeared in some movie shorts with sequences based on famous paintings.
15.
Mary Astor received critical recognition for the 1921 two-reeler The Beggar Maid.
16.
The older actor wooed the young actress, but their relationship was severely constrained by Astor's parents' unwillingness to let the couple spend time alone together; Mary was only seventeen and legally underage.
17.
In 1925, Mary Astor's parents bought a Moorish style mansion with 1 acre of land known as "Moorcrest" in the hills above Hollywood.
18.
Mary Astor's parents were not Theosophists, though the family was friendly with both Marie Hotchener and her husband Harry, prominent Theosophical Society members.
19.
Mary Astor settled the case by agreeing to pay her parents $100 a month.
20.
Mary Astor was named one of the WAMPAS Baby Stars in 1926, along with Mary Brian, Dolores Costello, Joan Crawford, Dolores del Rio, Janet Gaynor, and Fay Wray.
21.
On loan to Fox Film Corporation, Mary Astor starred in Dressed to Kill, which received good reviews, and the sophisticated comedy Dry Martini.
22.
Mary Astor gave her a Packard automobile as a wedding present and the couple moved into a home high up on Lookout Mountain in Los Angeles above Beverly Hills.
23.
Mary Astor was happy to work again, but her happiness soon ended.
24.
Mary Astor had just finished a matinee performance at the Majestic when Florence Eldridge gave her the news.
25.
Mary Astor was rushed from the theatre to Eldridge's apartment.
26.
Mary Astor remained with Eldridge at her apartment for some time, then soon returned to work.
27.
In late 1932, Mary Astor signed a featured player contract with Warner Bros.
28.
Mary Astor had to turn to the Motion Picture Relief Fund in 1933 to pay her bills.
29.
Mary Astor appeared as the female lead, Hilda Lake, niece of the murder victims, in The Kennel Murder Case, co-starring with William Powell as detective Philo Vance.
30.
Soon unhappy with her marriage, due to Thorpe having a short temper and a habit of listing her faults, by 1933 Mary Astor wanted a divorce.
31.
Thorpe, by now making use of his wife's income, discovered Mary Astor's diary, and told Mary Astor that her liaisons with other men, including Kaufman, would be used in any divorce proceeding to support the charge that she was an unfit mother.
32.
Mary Astor's diary was never formally offered as evidence during the trial, but Thorpe and his lawyers constantly referred to it, and its notoriety grew.
33.
Mary Astor admitted that the diary existed and that she had documented her affair with Kaufman, but maintained that many of the parts that had been referred to were forgeries, following the theft of the diary from her desk.
34.
In 1952, by court order, Mary Astor's diary was removed from the bank vault where it had been sequestered for 16 years and destroyed.
35.
In 1937, Mary Astor returned to the stage in well-received productions of Noel Coward's Tonight at 8.30, The Astonished Heart, and Still Life.
36.
In John Huston's classic The Maltese Falcon, Mary Astor played scheming temptress Brigid O'Shaughnessy.
37.
Davis wanted Mary Astor cast in the role after watching her screen test and seeing her play Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No 1.
38.
Mary Astor then recruited Astor to collaborate on rewriting the script, which Davis felt was mediocre and needed work to make it more interesting.
39.
Mary Astor further followed Davis's advice and sported a bobbed hairdo for the role.
40.
Mary Astor was not propelled into the upper echelon of movie stars by these successes, however.
41.
Mary Astor always declined offers to star in her own right.
42.
Mary Astor reunited with Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet in John Huston's Across the Pacific.
43.
The play was a failure, but Mary Astor received good reviews.
44.
Mary Astor was loaned to Paramount to play Fritzi Haller in Desert Fury, the tough owner of a saloon and casino in a small mining town.
45.
At MGM, Mary Astor continued being cast in undistinguished, colorless mother roles.
46.
Mary Astor found no redemption in playing what she considered another humdrum mother and grew despondent.
47.
Mary Astor later described her disappointment with her cast members and the shoot in her memoir A Life on Film:.
48.
Mary Astor admitted to alcoholism as far back as the 1930s, but it had never interfered with her work schedule or performance.
49.
Mary Astor hit bottom in 1949 and went into a sanitarium for alcoholics.
50.
Mary Astor was taken to a hospital and the police reported that she had attempted suicide, this being her third overdose in two years.
51.
Mary Astor credited her recovery to a priest, Peter Ciklic, a practicing psychologist, who encouraged her to write about her experiences as part of therapy.
52.
Mary Astor separated from her fourth husband, Thomas Wheelock, but did not actually divorce him until 1955.
53.
Mary Astor acted frequently in TV during the ensuing years and appeared on many big shows of the time, including The United States Steel Hour, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Rawhide, Dr Kildare, Burke's Law, and Ben Casey.
54.
Mary Astor starred on Broadway again in The Starcross Story, another failure, and returned to southern California in 1956.
55.
Mary Astor then went on a successful theatre tour of Don Juan in Hell directed by Agnes Moorehead and co-starring Ricardo Montalban.
56.
Mary Astor tried her hand at fiction, writing the novels The Incredible Charley Carewe, The Image of Kate, which was published in 1964 in a German translation as Jahre und Tage, The O'Conners, Goodbye, Darling, be Happy, and A Place Called Saturday.
57.
Mary Astor appeared in several movies during this time, including Stranger in My Arms.
58.
Mary Astor made a comeback in Return to Peyton Place playing Roberta Carter, the domineering mother who insists the "shocking" novel written by Allison Mackenzie should be banned from the school library, and received good reviews for her performance.
59.
Mary Astor filmed her final scene with Cecil Kellaway at Oak Alley Plantation in southern Louisiana.
60.
Mary Astor later moved to Fountain Valley, California, where she lived near her son, Anthony del Campo, and his family, until 1971.
61.
Mary Astor appeared in the television documentary series Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film, co-produced by Kevin Brownlow, in which she discussed her roles during the silent film period.
62.
Mary Astor died on September 25,1987, at age 81, of respiratory failure due to pulmonary emphysema while in the hospital at the Motion Picture House complex.
63.
Mary Astor is interred in Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California.
64.
Mary Astor has a motion pictures star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6701 Hollywood Boulevard.