Comprehensive information and links about Lana Turner

Lana Turner (February 8, 1921 – June 29, 1995) was an American actress famed early in her career for her appearances in tight sweaters, and her smoldering sensuality, and later in her career for sudsy romance films with maximal glamorous evening gowns and tragedy.

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Biography

The name on her birth certificate, as she stated in her autobiography, was , not Julia Jean Mildred Frances Turner as many sources claim. In any case, she was called "Judy" as a child and became when she became an actress. She was born in Wallace, Idaho. Her father was John Virgil Turner, who was born and raised in Hohenwald, Tennessee. John Virgil Turner was a clerk and a gambler who was murdered when she was a child. Her mother was Mildred Frances Cowan who was about 15 when she married John Virgil Turner.

Lana was discovered at the age of 15 in 1936 at the Top Hat Café in Hollywood by film journalist William R. Wilkerson, who introduced her to actortalent agent Zeppo Marx. She was soon signed by MGM.

Turner earned the nickname the "Sweater Girl" due to a scene in her debut movie of her fame in the 1940's and 1950's. During World War II, Turner became a popular pin-up girl due to her popularity in such films such as ened by gossip column rumors about a relationship between the two).

After the war, Turner's career hit a new high with the classic 1946 film noir , co-starring John Garfield. During the 1950's, Turner's films started to flop at the box-office, until she starred in Vincente Minnelli's masterpiece borrowed from Turner's private life -- a single mother coping with a troubled teenage daughter.

Off-screen, Turner was married eight times to seven different husbands, and had many lovers, including Tyrone Power (whom she calls the love of her life in her autobiography), Howard Hughes (who is reported to have given her syphilis), and a minor gangster named Johnny Stompanato who was fatally stabbed by Turner's daughter, Cheryl Crane. (The killing was deemed a justifiable homicide by coroner's inquest.)

Her husbands were bandleader Artie Shaw (1940); actor-restaurateur Josef Stephen Crane (1942-1943, 1943-44); millionaire socialite Henry J. Topping, Jr. (1948-52); actor Lex Barker (1953-57), whom she divorced after her daughter Cheryl claimed that he molested her; rancher Fred May (1960-62); businessman Robert Eaton (1965-69); and nightclub hypnotist Ronald Peller (a.k.a. Ronald Dante) (1969-72). She married Crane a second time, after their first marriage was annulled because a previous marriage of his had not yet been finalized.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Turner appeared in several television roles, but the majority of her final decade was spent out of the public eye.

She died rather suddenly at the age of 74 in 1995 of complications from the throat cancer which was diagnosed in 1992, and which she had been battling ever since, at her home in Century City, California.

She was survived by her only child, her daughter, Cheryl Crane, and Cheryl's female life partner, whom she said she accepted "as a second daughter". They inherited Lana's sizeable estate, built through shrewd real estate holdings and investments.

Influence

For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Lana Turner has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6241 Hollywood Blvd.

The eminent American poet Frank O'Hara wrote a poem titled "Lana Turner Has Collapsed" inspired by Turner after seeing a headline about her soon after her lover Stompanato's murder. The Stompanato incident is also alluded to in a short scene in the film