Linda Darnell is "Forever Amber"! starring Cornel Wilde!

One of the most beautiful actresses in Hollywood in the 1940s was Linda Darnell. Darnell was under contract at 20th Century-Fox from 1939 to 1952. She starred in a great number of costume and adventure dramas that would have been all right without her but gained enormously from her participation. Linda Darnell was touted by Hollywood wags as "the girl with the perfect face," and for once the description fit. Her cameo-cut china doll face was enough to ensure stardom in glamor-obsessed 1940s Hollywood; surely Darnell could easily fit into the top ten most beautiful women the screen has ever known. And as she matured, her voice deepened into a torchy throb that added intensity to the eventual siren image. Linda's screen image was as a sultry, dark-eyed beauty with a sort of gleaming sincerity she had a perfect complexion and was always an asset as she made the transition from virginal heroines in mantillas and lace to women not adverse to revealing a tough streak beneath the deceptive sweep of her wardrobe. Like many of the popular stars during the contract system, her career tailed off as soon as she left her studio's fold, but her popularity in her day had been real enough and would have been the same if she had worked for any other studio. United Artists cast Darnell on loan-out for a Chekhov adaptation, "Summer Storm" in 1944. She wasn't ready, but the publicity--with Darnell lolling about a la Jane Russell, combined with that face--launched a transformation beyond pin-up to apprentice love goddess. The rest of the decade found her often in interesting roles that displayed her as willful, sometimes venal, smouldering trouble. Memorable portraits in the Darnell's career include the strangled (and left to burn) music - hall trollop in "Hangover Square" (1945), the floozy waitress of "Fallen Angel" (also 1945, in which she acted circles around reigning studio queen Alice Faye.)

Linda said of Otto Preminger, that she found him “terrifying.” But her fabulous reviews in the noir classic must have soothed her nerves, and she seemed to have found her stride again., the ill-fated concubine in "Anna and the King of Siam" (1946, in which Darnell dies prophetically by fire.) Her most famous role was as the sultry celluloid vixen in Forever Amber 1947. On Forever Amber, Darnell was again paired with the tyrannical Preminger. She had dieted strenuously for the corset-heavy costume drama, and twice collapsed on the set from hunger as well as nervous exhaustion. And for all the misery she endured, the film fell short of its massive hype: while audiences cheered, the critics mostly yawned, and the film didn’t give Darnell the boost, either in confidence or in clout, that she’d hoped for. In Unfaithfully Yours, produced, written and directed by Preston Sturges, she’s the wife of an egocentric orchestra conductor (Rex Harrison) who concocts an elaborate revenge fantasy when he suspects she’s cheating on him. She’s so gasp-inducingly gorgeous, you’re almost distracted from how fabulously funny she is — a Sturges heroine who throws away her lines with the ease of a Colbert or a Stanwyck. In 1949’s A Letter to Three Wives, written and directed by Joseph Mankiewicz, Darnell earned the best reviews of her life. As Lora Mae Finney, a social-climbing beauty who’s literally from the wrong side of the tracks—the whole house shakes whenever a train roars by — she’s hard-edged, touching and hilarious. She gets some of the best lines in a flawless script, and casually belts every one of them into the stands. Determined to marry Porter Hollingsway (Paul Douglas), who owns the department store where she and half the town work, Lora Mae wangles a late-night meeting to discuss a promotion, though both she and Porter know it’s a prelude to something more. As she sweeps into the kitchen before the date, her mother’s friend Sadie (Thelma Ritter), who deems her dress much too simple, asks, “Doncha think you should wear something with beads?” And Lora Mae replies matter-of-factly, “Ma, what I got don’t need beads.” She’s not vain, just realistic—but she thinks she’s savvier than she is. She plans to snag Porter by playing the naif, but soon discovers just how out far of her depth, and genuinely innocent, she really is. That Darnell wasn’t even nominated for an Oscar for her performance was criminal; they should have just dispensed with the ceremony and mailed the thing to her house. As the studio system began to collapse, so did Darnell’s film career; Fox dropped her contract in 1952. She freelanced for a while, with little success. “I thought in a little while I’d get offers from other studios, but not many came along,” she said, more out of confusion than bitterness. “The only thing I knew how to do was be a movie star. No one expects to last forever in this business. You know that sooner or later the studio’s going to let you go. But who wants to be retired at twenty-nine?” She did received good notices for "No Way Out" (1950), a race relations drama ahead of its time, but as happened with Rita Hayworth, Hollywood tended to treat mature beauties in nonglamourous roles as if they were finished commercially in the business. So she turned to television and then the stage, where, to the surprise of skeptics, she thrived in plays as far-flung as The Children’s Hour, Critic’s Choice and A Roomful of Roses.

In 1956, she took on the daunting role of the compassionate teacher in a Miami production of Robert Anderson’s controversial Tea and Sympathy, opposite a 20-year-old Burt Reynolds. “I’m scared stiff [about the play],” she confided to local reporters. “But this marvelous, magic world of live theater is one of the high spots of my life.” The Miami Herald called it a “sensitive, absorbing presentation” in which “Miss Darnell gives the role a new dimension.” Throughout her last years, Darnell continued to work sporadically. In the spring of 1965, while preparing for a play near Chicago, she stayed at the home of her friend and former secretary, Jeanne Curtis, one of many former Fox staffers who still adored her. Late one night, she turned on the television only to find her 17-year-old self staring back at her in Star Dust, her second big film. Not long after drifting off to sleep, she was jolted awake by the smell of smoke and the sounds of panic: the house was on fire. While Curtis, her husband and her daughter leapt to safety from a second-floor window, Darnell, too terrified to jump, tried to escape through a downstairs door. But a neighbor had run over and smashed a back window with a shovel, and the inrushing air fed the fire and spread the flames throughout the first floor. Darnell, who had a lifelong fear of fire, was found crouched behind the sofa, burned over almost 90 percent of her body. She died at the hospital two days later, regaining consciousness only once, briefly, when Lola arrived at her bedside. She was 41 years old.

Thank you so much Marc for your trivia and comments!