27 March: Gloria Swanson

Actress Gloria Swanson was born on this date in 1899. Here are 10 facts about her:

1. Her name at birth was Gloria May Josephine Svensson. She was born in Chicago.

2. Her father was attached to the US Army and so she moved around a lot as a child. She was an only child. Her mother dressed her flamboyantly to draw attention away from her large teeth.

3. She didn’t set out to become a movie star and when she left school her first job was as a sales clerk in a department store. She had a crush on an actor called Francis X. Bushman, and decided to take a tour of the studio where he worked. The tour guide saw her potential as a star and as a result, she got her first film role in The Fable of Elvira and Farina and the Meal Ticket.

4. Her early roles tended to be in slapstick comedies, of which she wasn’t a great fan. At one point she worked with Charlie Chaplin, but the pair weren’t the least bit impressed with each other. “All morning I felt like a cow trying to dance with a toy poodle,” she would later write, and Chaplin demanded she be replaced. Not that it was any skin off Gloria’s nose. “I would have been mortified if anybody I knew had ever seen me get kicked in the pants…by an odd sprite in a hobo outfit,” she wrote.

5. In 1925, she founded her own production company, Gloria Productions, giving her greater control over her career.

6. She was the original inspiration for illustrations of Morticia Addams in the New Yorker in the 1930s.

7. She was quite superstitious and one of her quirks was always sleeping with her head pointing due north. She would demand that hotel rooms be rearranged to accommodate this.

8. She had six husbands and had numerous affairs. She married for the first time at 17, to Wallace Beery and realised right away this had been a terrible mistake and filed for divorce when he gave her pills for morning sickness which caused a miscarriage. She went on to wed Herbert K. Somborn but he divorced her citing affairs with 13 men; Henri, Marquis de la Falaise, who despite the marriage ending in divorce remained a friend and with him she helped scientists flee from Nazi Germany; Michael Farmer, who she only married because she got pregnant and he threatened to ruin her career by going public with the news; William Davey, who tried to divorce her for mental cruelty when she tried to get him to admit he was an alcoholic. He died soon after and left her nothing in his will; and William Dufty, to whom she remained married until she died.

9. She was considered for the part of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind.

10. She was an early advocate of healthy eating and was known for bringing her own food to public functions.