Tallulah Brockman Bankhead (January 31, 1902 - December 12, 1968) was a United States actress, talk-show host and bonne vivante, born in Huntsville, Alabama.

Family life

She was the daughter of Congressman William Brockman Bankhead, niece of Senator John H. Bankhead II, and granddaughter of Senator John H. Bankhead. Her parents sent her to various schools in an attempt to keep her out of trouble, which included a year at a Catholic convent school (although her father was a Methodist and Tallulah's mother was an Episcopalian). Apparently these attempts didn't "take". Tallulah had no children, but was the godmother of Brook Seawell and Brockman Seawell, children of her lifelong friend, Georgia-born actress Eugenia Rawls and Rawls' husband, Donald Seawell.

Early career

At 15, Tallulah Bankhead won a movie-magazine beauty contest and convinced her family to let her move to New York. She quickly won bit parts, first appearing in a non-speaking role in The Squab Farm.

During these early New York years, she became a peripheral member of the Algonquin Round Table and known as a hard-partying girl-about-town, and she became involved in a lesbian affair with powerful actress Alla Nazimova. She later was also involved romantically with actress Eva Le Gallienne, and writer Mercedes de Acosta.

She became known for her wit, although as screenwriter Anita Loos, another minor Roundtable member said: "She was so pretty that we thought she must be stupid." In 1923, she made her debut on the London stage, where she was to appear in over a dozen plays in the next eight years. Famous as an actress, she was famous, too, for her drinking, drug taking, and many affairs with men and women. By the end of the decade, she was one of the West End's — and England's — best-known celebrities.

Mid career

She returned to US in 1931 to be Paramount Pictures' "next Marlene Dietrich", but Hollywood success eluded her in her first four films of the 30s. Critics agree that her acting was flat, that she was unable to dominate the camera, and that she was generally outclassed by Dietrich, Carole Lombard, and others.

Nevertheless, David O. Selznick called her the "first choice among established stars" to play Scarlett O'Hara, but nobody else agreed; polled, moviegoers thought otherwise.

Her screen test for Gone with the Wind put her out of the running for good. Selznick decided that she was too old (at 34) for Scarlett's antebellum scenes.

Returning to Broadway, Tallulah's career stalled in unmemorable plays until she played Regina in Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes (1939). Her portrayal won her the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Performance, but Bankhead and Hellman feuded over the Soviet Union's invasion of Finland: Bankhead (a staunch anti-Communist) was said to want a portion of one performance's proceeds to go to Finnish relief; Hellman (an equally staunch Stalinist) objected strenuously, and the two women didn't speak for the next quarter of a century.

More success and the same award followed her 1942 performance in Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, in which Bankhead played Sabina, the housekeeper and temptress, opposite Fredric March and Florence Eldridge ("Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus", and also husband and wife offstage) During the run of the play, some media accused Bankhead of a running feud with the play's director, Elia Kazan, but both denied it.

In 1944, Alfred Hitchcock cast her as the cynical journalist, Constance Porter, in Lifeboat. The performance is widely acknowledged as her best on film, and won her the New York Screen Critics Award.

After World War II, Bankhead appeared in a revival of Noel Coward's Private Lives taking it on tour and then to Broadway for the better part of two years. The play's run made Bankhead a fortune. From that time, Bankhead could command 10% of the gross and billed larger than any other actor in the cast, although she usually granted equal billing to Estelle Winwood, a frequent co-star, and Bankhead's "best friend" from the 1920s until Bankhead's death in 1968.

Following her father's example, Bankhead was a staunch Democrat and campaigned for Harry Truman's reelection in 1948. While viewing the Inauguration parade, she booed the South Carolina float which carried then-Governor Strom Thurmond, who had recently run against Truman on the Dixiecrat ticket, splitting the Democratic vote.

Late career

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. Her appearance as herself on The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Comedy Hour in 1957 as The Celebrity Next Door — drunk, according to Ball — is a cult favorite, as is her role as the "Black Widow" on the 1960s campy television show, Batman, which turned out to be her final screen appearance. Bankhead's radio program on NBC was The Big Show and was billed to stem the tide of television. The program did not keep television from flourishing but it had Meredith Willson as its musical host, and featured top stars from Broadway, films, radio, and elsewhere--including Fred Allen, George Jessel, Groucho Marx, Ethel Merman, Dame Vera Lynn and Margaret Truman.

Bankhead's career was in decline by the mid-1950s. Her outrageous behavior, fueled by a two-bottle-a-day consumption of Old Grand Dad, continued unabated. And behavior that was endearingly wicked in a flapper starlet of the Twenties was wearyingly vulgar in an aging, falling star in the Sixties. Bankhead never faded from the public eye, but was increasingly a caricature of her former self. By this time, when she appeared as "Blanche DuBois" in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire gay fans cheered and laughed at her performance, hurting its dramatic tone and preventing her from achieving the desired result of a faded Southern woman.

Although she received fairly good notices for "Midgie Purvis", the eponymous character who pretended to be twenty years older in order to be grandmotherly and have access to children, the play did not sell well and it closed within the season. Bankhead's last performance, in Williams's play, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, lasted only a week.

Her shortcomings notwithstanding, Tallulah always remained a personality who got good notices in the media. According to author Brendan Gill's Tallulah, when Bankhead entered the hospital for an illness, an article was headed "Tallulah hospitalized, Hospital Tallulahized".

Dick Cavett repeated on film the story that she responded to Chico Marx's statement: "I'd really like to f**k you", with, "And you shall, you dear boy, and you shall." (The line may have been a particular Bankhead trademark whenever a man to whom she was attracted propositioned her so bluntly.) She even purchased a lion cub from a circus in Reno, Nevada for $100 and named him Winston Churchill, but eventually gave him up when he got too large to handle.

Death

Tallulah Bankhead died in New York City of double pneumonia arising from influenza, complicated further by emphysema, at the age of 66 on December 12, 1968, and is buried in Saint Paul's Churchyard, Chestertown, Maryland.

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