Clara Bow, silent screen actress, was born on this date in 1905. 10 things you might not know about her:
She was born in Brooklyn, New York in a tenement apartment above a Baptist church. Her mother had been advised by her doctor not to get pregnant again having lost two babies already. Sarah Bow ignored the advice and nearly lost Clara as well since the already risky pregnancy was put at further risk by a heatwave. Years later, Clara wrote: "I don't suppose two people ever looked death in the face more clearly than my mother and I the morning I was born.”
Clara’s mother suffered from epilepsy and mental illness after falling from a second-story window and suffering a head injury. From an early age, Clara had to learn what to do if her mother had a seizure or a psychotic episode. Her father was rarely around.
It was her miserable home life which led her to movies. When she watched them, she said, “For the first time in my life I knew there was beauty in the world.”
Her first job was working at a Hot dog stand. Not long after that she entered a competition in a magazine to win a role in a film called Beyond the Rainbow. She won and played the lead’s little sister. Only when she went to see the film with two of her friends, she found her scenes had all been cut.
Her mother didn’t approve of her acting career to put it mildly. One night during the shooting of Beyond the Rainbow, Clara awoke to see her mother standing over her with a knife, saying, "I'm gonna kill ya, Clara. It'll be better." Sarah chased her daughter around the flat with the knife and then fainted. Next morning, Sarah couldn’t remember any of it. Sarah was committed to an asylum; Clara suffered from lifelong insomnia.
Despite the knock back with Beyond the Rainbow, Clara didn’t give up on acting and went on to appear in 46 silent films and 11 talkies. One of her most famous films was called It (no, not the one with the creepy clown) in which she played a salesgirl. It was based on a story by Elinor Glyn which had been published in Cosmopolitan. This film was the origin of the term “It girl”, with Clara being the first one.
Max Fleischer's cartoon character Betty Boop was based on her.
There was a lot of scandal and rumour circulating at the time about her love life. Not all of it was true. One article claimed she’d slept with the entire USC football team, which at the time included a young offensive tackle named Marion Morrison, who would later find fame as John Wayne. There’s no evidence it happened, though. She did have a brief affair with Bela Lugosi and is said to have attended a showing of the play Dracula wearing nothing but a fur coat and a bathing suit. He commissioned a nude portrait of her, which he hung over his bed and kept until he died.
She was only 28 when she retired and went to live on a working ranch with her husband, Western actor Rex Bell. They had two children together and lived happily at first, but Clara began showing signs of mental illness, attempting suicide in her 30s. Her suicide note stated she would rather be dead than famous. By the time she died from a heart attack at the age of 60, she had left her family and was living as a recluse.
She found the transition to talkies hard, less because of her strong Brooklyn accent than because having to stand near a microphone was too restrictive. She liked to walk around when acting. Boom microphones helped, but she had a tendency to look nervously up at it. Ironically, her last ever performance was on the Radio where she was the mystery voice in a contest in 1947.
Character Birthday
Who's That Girl?
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