Biography jeanne eagels

&#;I&#;m the greatest actress in the world and the greatest failure, and nobody gives a damn.&#;

Chances are, unless you came across this post while looking for information about Jeanne Eagels, that you&#;ve never heard the name, let alone known the reputation that Eagels enjoyed among her contemporaries as an incandescent, proto-method actress. She was beautiful and brilliant, acclaimed as a great genius, and yet she also seemed to be in a hurry to destroy her career and her life.

She was born into a poor family in Kansas, ran off to join a traveling theatrical company at age 12, landed in New York, remade herself, became a chorine and a Ziegfeld Girl, studied acting and became a sought after theatrical name. As her heavy schedule &#; which soon included silent films &#; began to weigh on her, she self-medicated with pills, alcohol and possibly harder stuff.

Soon, after dozens of successful roles, she became a Broadway super-star playing Sadie Thompson in Somerset Maugham&#;s &#;Rain.&#; As her fame increased, so did her reputation for temperamental behavior and even unreliability. She drank even during performances and made work difficult for her co-stars and directors, but she also focused her performance like a laser and communicated her great reserves of emotional pain in a focused way that had scarcely been seen before. The word &#;genius&#; became permanently attached to her name.

Her &#;Rain&#; director John C. Williams said of her, &#;First off, she knew to perfection, and adhered to as to a religion, the art of listening in acting. At every performance, whether the first, or the hundredth, the speeches of the character addressing her were not merely heard but listened to. Hence there was always thought and belief and conviction behind every speech and scene of her own&#; the essence of theater illusion.&#;

This was not always so typical of stage divas, and it gives an idea of why young Barbara

Okay, first, if you are under the age of 95, you might ask, who is Jeanne Eagels?

Well, she was a big Broadway and film star in the s and ‘20s &#; in fact, one of the biggest.

And her Ossining connection is that she owned not one, but two estates here:  a acre estate called “Kringejan” at Kitchawan Road, and acres of land and a house on Cedar Lane Road.

In fact, I&#;m convinced that these two photos below were taken in the gardens of Kringejan:

And here&#;s a description of her 2nd home in Ossining, on Cedar Lane Road:

In those days, Ossining was quite the place for the gentry to land &#; businessmen, bankers, writers and actors were snapping up farms and transforming them into elegant country estates.  According to Eric Woodard and Tara Hanks in their biography Jeanne Eagels: A Life Revealed, Eagels fell in love with the Ossining area when she was making silent films at Thanhouser Studios in New Rochelle.

Hers was the classic “lift yourself up by your bootstraps” story that America values.  A small-town girl comes to the big city and makes good.  She started by nabbing bit parts in around , and by dint of hard work, talent and luck, reached the top of her profession before her untimely death at the age of

found her on a list with Rockefellers, Roosevelts, Guggenheims and Harrimans when the income tax payments of Manhattan’s wealthiest were made public.  

But somehow, that&#;s not at all how she&#;s remembered.

She lived most of her life on that tricky front line where she was applauded for her success while at the same time condemned for it.  She was raised up and then torn down time and time again.  The insatiable curiosity of the press and the public transformed almost every detail of her life into something salacious.  

So, le

Volume III: Biographies

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Former Thanhouser star Jeanne Eagles and Jack Gilbert on location for a later film, "Man, Woman and Son."

Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (X)

Thanhouser Career Synopsis: Jeanne Eagels appeared in Thanhouser films in and

Biographical Notes:The following paragraphs are based upon information derived from numerous newspaper clippings, magazine articles, and other contemporary sources. At the conclusion of the initial biography, excerpts are given from a revisionist biography written in by Edward Doherty in an article titled "Jeanne Eagels" (also published in book form asThe Rain Girl).

According to accounts published in her lifetime, Jeanne Eagels, christened as Jeannine, was born in Boston on June 26, , of an Irish mother and a Spanish father, Edward and Julia Sullivan Eagels. Her father's surname originally was said to have been Aguilar, equivalent to "eagle" in Spanish, and it was misspelled in English as "Eagels." From the age of two she spent her childhood in Kansas City, Missouri. In her entire life she had only a year and a half of formal education. Her father was an unrealistic idealist who always had trouble supporting his family.

When she was six years old, her father had the idea of sending her to an instructor for "parlor training," in which she was taught dance steps, the recital of poetry, and the reading of simple scenes from plays. She later recalled that at the age of seven she was given the role of Puck inA Midsummer Night's Dream,staged by her "parlor training" teacher. In another recollection, she named her first play asHamlet.

Little Jeanne was fascinated by acting and decided to become an actress. At the age of 12 she was with the Woodward Stock Company in Kansas City, in the role of Eva inUncle Tom's Cabin,later touring inThe Outcast, East Lynne, Camille, The Great Pursuit,and other plays. Her first appearance in New York City was at the age of 17, inJumping

film by George Sidney

Jeanne Eagels (also titled The Jeanne Eagels Story) is a American biographical film loosely based on the life of stage star Jeanne Eagels. Distributed by Columbia Pictures, the film was produced and directed by George Sidney from a screenplay by John Fante, Daniel Fuchs and Sonya Levien, based on a story by Fuchs.

The film stars Kim Novak in the title role and Jeff Chandler.

Many aspects of Eagels' real life were omitted or largely fictionalized. Eagels' family later sued Columbia Pictures over the way Eagels was depicted in the film.

Plot

Jeanne Eagels is a Kansas City waitress. After losing a beauty contest, she asks carnival owner Sal Satori for a job. Her dance in a skimpy costume is called obscene. Sal joins his brother in New York and invites Jeanne to join them at an amusement park on Coney Island.

Taking acting lessons instead, the ambitious Jeanne becomes the understudy in a Broadway show and a star when she gets a chance to play the part. A former successful actress named Elsie Desmond wants to make a comeback in a new play, but Jeanne betrays her and takes the play for herself, willing to do anything to advance. Elsie denounces her in the theater before the first performance and then commits suicide. Sal is also disgusted by Jeanne's behavior. She accepts a proposal from a lowlife named John Donahue, but both descend into alcoholism. Jeanne misses performances and causes fellow actors to lose paychecks.

Jeanne's situation deteriorates further when she must pay alimony to John after a divorce. A new play fails because Jeanne, drunk and on pills, collapses on stage. The actors' guild suspends her for 18 months. Unable to work, she returns to Sal's amusement park and is offered a job dancing. Another performer sexually assaults her in a dressing room. Jeanne, her life in ruins, continues to spiral downward and hallucinate. While trying to take the s