Evelyn Keyes
Evelyn Louise Keyes was an American film actress. She is best known for her role as Suellen O'Hara in the 1939 film Gone with the Wind.
Early life
Evelyn Keyes was born in Port Arthur, Texas, to Omar Dow Keyes and Maude Ollive Keyes, the daughter of a Methodist minister. After Omar Keyes died when she was three years old, Keyes moved with her mother to Atlanta, Georgia, where they lived with her grandparents. According to her memoir, Keyes was sexually molested by one of her brother's friends when she was five years old. As a teenager, Keyes took dancing lessons and performed for local clubs such as the Daughters of the Confederacy.Film career
A chorus girl by age 18, Keyes came out to Hollywood and was introduced to Cecil B. DeMille who in her own words "signed me to a personal contract without even making a test". After a handful of B movies at Paramount Pictures, she was cast in Say It in French. However, Keyes had to drop out to have an abortion and was replaced by Olympe Bradna. Later, she auditioned for the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind. Though she failed to get the part, Selznick was impressed by her Southern accent and cast her as Scarlett O'Hara's sister Suellen in January 1939.Columbia Pictures signed her to a contract. In 1941, she played an ingenue in Here Comes Mr. Jordan. She spent most of the early 1940s playing leads in many of Columbia's B dramas and mysteries. She appeared as the female lead opposite Larry Parks in Columbia's blockbuster hit The Jolson Story. She followed this up with an enjoyable minor screwball comedy, The Mating of Millie, with Glenn Ford. She was then in a 1949 role as Kathy Flannigan in Mrs. Mike.
While under contract at Columbia, Keyes had long complained about the lack of challenging roles offered to her. When Sam Spiegel had bought the story for the film noir thriller The Prowler, John Huston thought it would be the perfect project for Keyes, his then estranged wife, who went on to star in the 1951 movie alongside Van Heflin. Keyes felt it to be the best role and performance of her career. Keyes' last role in a major film was a small part as Tom Ewell's vacationing wife in The Seven Year Itch. Keyes officially retired in 1956, but continued to act.
Personal life
In her autobiography Scarlett O'Hara's Younger Sister: My Lively Life In and Out of Hollywood, Keyes described being sexually harassed by her director Andrew Stone while working on Say It in French. She soon found out she was pregnant, and had an abortion before filming of Say It in French resumed. She wasn't at her best on set, and Stone humiliated her for her poor work. She was fired from the picture, replaced by Olympe Branda.Only weeks later, she was cast in Gone With the Wind. She married Barton Bainbridge shortly after. Bainbridge was an alcoholic, and threatened Keyes with a gun on at least one occasion. They separated and in 1940, he committed suicide with a shotgun in her car, leaving a note. Keyes wrote: "The note said it was because I had left him. I never left a man again. I made them leave me."
Later, she married and divorced director Charles Vidor, actor/director John Huston, and bandleader Artie Shaw. Keyes said of her many love affairs: "I always took up with the man of the moment and there were many such moments." During her marriage to Huston, the couple adopted a twelve-year-old Mexican child, Pablo, whom Huston had discovered while filming on location in Mexico for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. In her memoir, Keyes claimed that her adoptive son sexually molested her and that they lost contact after only a few years.
Keyes expressed her opinion that Mrs. Mike was her best film. Among her many love affairs in Hollywood she recounted in Scarlett O'Hara's Younger Sister, were those with film producer Michael Todd, actors Glenn Ford, Sterling Hayden, Dick Powell, Anthony Quinn, David Niven and Kirk Douglas. She had to regularly fend off Columbia Pictures studio head Harry Cohn's advances during her career at the studio.
Keyes died of uterine cancer on July 4, 2008 at the Pepper Estates in Montecito, California, and was cremated. Half her ashes were sent to Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas and the rest were divided among relatives and buried in a family plot at Waco Baptist Church Cemetery, Waco, Georgia, with a small tombstone bearing the epitaph Gone with the Wind.