Tallulah Brockman Bankhead

 Tallulah Brockman Bankhead (January 31, 1902 – December 12, 1968).

In her autobiography, Bankhead claimed that her "first performance" was witnessed by none other than the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur. Her Aunt Marie gave the famous brothers a party at her home near Montgomery, Alabama, in which the guests were asked to entertain. "I won the prize for the top performance, with an imitation of my kindergarten teacher", Bankhead wrote. "The judges? Orville and Wilbur Wright." In 1918, she made her stage debut at the Bijou Theatre in New York. In 1923, she made her debut on the London stage at Wyndham's Theatre. In London, she was to appear in over a dozen plays over the next eight years, most famously, The Dancers. Her fame as an actress was ensured in 1924 when she played Amy in Sidney Howard's They Knew What They Wanted. Bankhead's first film was Tarnished Lady (1931), directed by George Cukor, and the pair became fast friends. Her 1932 movie Devil and the Deep is notable for the presence of three major co-stars, with Bankhead receiving top billing over Gary Cooper, Charles Laughton, and Cary Grant, and remains the only film with both Cooper and Grant as the film's leading men. In 1933, Bankhead nearly died following a five-hour emergency hysterectomy due to venereal disease. Bankhead weighed only 70 pounds when she left the hospital, and stoically said to her doctor, "Don't think this has taught me a lesson!" David O. Selznick, producer of Gone with the Wind (1939) called her the "first choice among established stars" to play Scarlett O'Hara. Although her screen test for the role in black-and-white was superb, she photographed poorly in Technicolor. Selznick also reportedly believed that at age 36, she was too old to play Scarlett, who is 16 at the beginning of the film. In 1944, Alfred Hitchcock cast her as cynical journalist Constance Porter in her most successful film, both critically and commercially, Lifeboat. Her performance was acknowledged as her best on film and won her the New York Film Critics Circle Award. A beaming Bankhead accepted her New York trophy and exclaimed, "Dahlings, I was wonderful!" Though Bankhead's career slowed in the mid-1950s, she never faded from the public eye.

Although she had become a heavy smoker (reportedly 150 cigarettes/day), heavy drinker, and consumer of sleeping pills (she was a lifelong insomniac), Bankhead continued to perform in the 1950s and 1960s on Broadway, in the occasional film, as a highly popular radio show host, and in the new medium of television. Tallulah Bankhead died at age 66 from pleural pneumonia, complicated by emphysema, malnutrition, and possibly a strain of the Hong Kong flu which was running worldwide at that time. She is buried at Saint Pauls Kent Churchyard in Chestertown, MD.