Gene Tierney

 According to his daughter Victoria, Vincent Price felt that Gene Tierney had as much to do with the success of the film "Laura" (1944) as Otto Preminger's direction: "In his opinion, it was Gene Tierney's 'odd beauty' and underrated acting ability that made 'Laura' so popular," she said. "He felt her beauty was both timeless and imperfect."

Tierney didn't give herself much credit for its success: "I never felt my own performance was much more than adequate. I am pleased that audiences still identify me with Laura, as opposed to not being identified at all. Their tributes, I believe, are for the character--the dreamlike Laura--rather than any gifts I brought to the role. I do not mean to sound modest. I doubt that any of us connected with the movie thought it had a chance of becoming a kind of mystery classic, or enduring beyond its generation . . . If it worked, it was because the ingredients turned out to be right."

The portrait of Gene Tierney as Laura appeared in "On the Riviera" (1951) (in color) co-starring Danny Kaye, then later in "Woman's World" (1954) starring co-birthday celebrant Clifton Webb, the frustrated Waldo Lydecker of "Laura." In "Woman's World", the painting hung on a wall amid portraits of several other women who were supposed to have been former romantic interests of Webb's character. Artist Azadia Newman, Rouben Mamoulian's wife, was commissioned to paint the portrait of Laura with which the detective becomes entranced, but it was not used in the final film.

In his autobiography, Preminger wrote, "When I scrapped Mamoulian's sets, the portrait of Laura went with them." According to Preminger, "portraits rarely photograph well, so I devised a compromise. We had a photograph of Gene Tierney enlarged and smeared with oil paint to soften the outlines. It looked like a painting but was unmistakably Gene Tierney."

Happy Birthday, Gene Tierney!