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Tallulah Brockman Bankhead (January 31, 1902 -
December 12, 1968) was a United States
actor|actress, talk-show host and bonne vivante,
born in Huntsville, Alabama. 

She was the daughter of United States House of
Representatives|Congressman William Brockman
Bankhead, niece of United States Senate|Senator
John H. Bankhead II, and granddaughter of Senator
John H. Bankhead.

At 15, Tallulah Bankhead won a movie-magazine
beauty contest & convinced her family to let her
move to New York. She quickly won bit parts, first
appearing in a non-speaking role in The Squab
Farm. 

During these early New York years, she became a
peripheral member of the Algonquin Round Table and
known as a hard-partying girl-about-town. She also
became known for her wit, although as screenwriter
Anita Loos, another minor Roundtable member said:
"She was so pretty that we thought she must be
stupid." 

In 1923, she made her debut on the London stage,
where she was to appear in over a dozen plays in
the next eight years. Famous as an actress, she
was famous, too, for her drinking, drug taking,
and many affairs with men and women. By the end of
the decade, she was one of the West End of
London|West End's — and England's —
best-known celebrities. 

She returned to US in 1931 to be Paramount
Pictures' "next Marlene Dietrich", but Hollywood
success eluded her in her first four films of the
30s. Critics agree that her acting was flat and
that she was unable to dominate the camera —
and that she was generally outclassed by Dietrich,
Carole Lombard, et al. 

Nevertheless, David O. Selznick called her the
"first choice among established stars" to play
Scarlett O'Hara. 

Polled, moviegoers thought otherwise. Her screen
test for Gone with the Wind put her out of the
running for good — Selznick decided that she
was too old (at 34) for Scarlett's antebellum
scenes. (One also wonders if the cynical Bankhead
could have played "Fiddle-Dee-Dee" Scarlett with
anything approaching a straight face.)

Returning to Broadway, Tallulah's career stalled
in unmemorable plays until she played Regina in
Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes (1939). Her
portrayal won the New York Drama Critics Circle
Award for Best Performance. More success and the
same award followed her 1942 performance in
Thornton Wilder's "The Skin of Our Teeth".
Bankhead played Sabina, the housekeeper and
temptress, opposite Fredric March and Florence
Eldridge (Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus and husband and
wife offstage.)  During the run of the play, some
media accused Bankhead of a running feud with the
play's director, Elia Kazan, but both denied it.

In 1944, Alfred Hitchcock cast her as journalist
and cynic Constance Porter in Lifeboat
(movie)|Lifeboat. The performance is widely
acknowledged as her best on film, and won her the
New York Screen Critics Award. 

After World War II, Bankhead appeared in a revival
of Noel Coward's "Private Lives" taking it on tour
and then to Broadway for the better part of two
years.  The play's run made Bankhead a fortune. 
From that time, Bankhead could command ten percent
of the gross and billing larger than any other
actor in the cast, although she usually granted
equal billing to Estelle Winwood, a frequent
co-star.

Following her father's example, Bankhead was a
staunch Democrat and campaigned for Harry Truman's
reelection in 1948.  While viewing the
Inauguration parade, she booed the South Carolina
float which carried then-Governor Strom Thurmond,
who had recently run against Truman on the
Dixiecrat ticket, splitting the Democratic vote.

Bankhead continued to perform in the 1950s and
1960s, on Broadway, in the occasional film, as a
highly-popular radio show host, and in the new
medium of television. Her appearance as herself on
The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Comedy Hour in 1957 as
"The Neighbor Next Door"  — drunk, according
to Ball — is a cult favorite as is her role
as the Black Widow on television's Batman.
Bankhead's radio program on National Broadcasting
Corporation|NBC was "The Big Show" and was billed
to stem the tide of television.  The program did
not keep television from flourishing but it had
Meredith Willson as its musical host, and featured
top stars from Broadway and elsewhere including
Ethel Merman, Vera Lynn and Margaret Truman.

Bankhead's career was in decline by the mid-1950s.
Her outrageous behavior — fueled by a
two-bottle-a-day consumption of bourbon
whiskey|Old Grand Dad — continued unabated.
And behavior that was endearingly wicked in a
flapper starlet of the Twenties was wearyingly
vulgar in an aging, falling star in the Sixties.
Bankhead never faded from the public eye, but was
increasingly a caricature of her former self. By
this time, when she appeared as Blanche DuBois in
Tennessee Williams's "A Streetcar Named Desire"
her adoring coterie of homosexual fans cheered and
laughed at her performance hurting its dramatic
tone and preventing her from achieving the desired
result of a faded Southern woman.

Although she received fairly good notices for
Midgie Purvis, a character who pretended to be
twenty years older in order to be grandmotherly
and have access to children, the play did not sell
well and it closed within the season.  Bankhead's
last performance in Williams's "The Milk Train
Does Not Stop Here Anymore" only lasted a week.

Her shortcomings notwithstanding, Tallulah always
remained a personality who got good notices in the
media.  According to Brendan Gill's Tallulah, when
Bankhead entered the hospital for an illness, an
article was headed "Tallulah hospitalized, 
Hospital Tallulahized."

Dick Cavett repeated on film the story that she
responded to Chico Marx's statement "I'd really
like to fuck you" with "And you shall, you dear
boy, and you shall." She even purchased a lion cub
from a circus in Reno, Nevada for $100 and named
him Winston Churchill, but eventually gave him up
when he got too large to handle.

Tallulah Bankhead died in New York City of
pneumonia arising from influenza, complicated
further by emphysema, in December 1968, and is
buried in Saint Paul's Churchyard,
Chestertown,_Maryland|Chestertown, Maryland

She was married to actor John Emery from
1937-1941.

==Famous Quotes==

*I'll come and make love to you at five o'clock.
If I'm late, start without me.
*They used to shoot her through gauze. You should
shoot me through linoleum. (Referring to Shirley
Temple)
*I'm as pure as the driven slush.
*It's the good girls who keep diaries; the bad
girls never have the time.
*The only thing I regret about my past is the
length of it. If I had to live my life again, I'd
make the same mistakes, only sooner.
*My father warned me about men and booze... but he
never said anything about women and cocaine.
*I read Shakespeare and the Bible, and I can shoot
dice. That's what I call a liberal education.
*Nobody can be exactly like me. Sometimes even I
have trouble doing it. 
*If you really want to help the American theater,
don't be an actress, dahling. Be an audience. 
*Here's a rule I recommend. Never practice two
vices at once.
*Let's not quibble! I'm the foe of moderation, the
champion of excess. If I may lift a line from a
die-hard whose identity is lost in the shuffle,
"I'd rather be strongly wrong than weakly right."
*Cocaine habit-forming? Of course not. I ought to
know. I've been using it for years.

==Filmography==

*Who Loved Him Best? (1918)
*When Men Betray (1918)
*Thirty a Week (1918)
*The Trap (1919)
*His House in Order (1928)
*Tarnished Lady (1931)
*My Sin (1931)
*The Cheat (1931)
*Thunder Below (1932)
*Make Me a Star (1932) (cameo)
*Devil and the Deep (1932)
*Faithless (1932)
*Stage Door Canteen (1932)
*Lifeboat (movie)|Lifeboat (1944)
*A Royal Scandal (1945)
*Main Street to Broadway (1953)
*The Boy Who Owned a Melephant (1959) (narrator)
*Die! Die! My Darling! (1965)
*The Daydreamer (1966) (voice)

==Theater Performances==

*1918 The Squab Farm
*1919 39 East 
*1919 Footloose
*1921 Nice People
*1921 Everyday 
*1922 Danger
*1922 Her Temporary Husband 
*1922 The Exciters 
*1923 The Dancers
*1924 Conchita
*1924 This Marriage
*1924 The Creaking Chair
*1925 Fallen Angels
*1925 The Green Hat 
*1926 Scotch Mist 
*1926 They Knew What They Wanted 
*1926 The Gold Diggers
*1927 The Garden of Eden
*1928 Blackmail
*1928 Mud and Treacle
*1928 Her Cardboard Lover
*1928 He's Mine
*1930 The Lady of the Camellias
*1930 Let Us Be Gay
*1933 Forsaking All Others
*1934 Dark Victory
*1935 Rain
*1935 Something Gay
*1936 Reflected Glory
*1937 Antony and Cleopatra
*1938 The Circle
*1938 I Am Different
*1939 The Little Foxes
*1941 Clash By Night
*1942 The Skin of Our Teeth
*1945 Foolish Notion
*1947 The Eagle Has Two Heads
*1948 Private Lives
*1954 Dear Charles
*1956 A Streetcar Named Desire
*1956 Ziegfeld Follies
*1957 Eugenia
*1958 Crazy October
*1961 Midgie Purvis
*1964 The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore

==External links==
*http://home.hiwaay.net/~oliver/bankhead.html
Tallulah Bankhead - A Passionate LifeBankhead
*http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/articles
/050516crat_atlarge "Dah-ling: The strange case of
Tallulah Bankhead" by Robert Gottlieb, The New
Yorker, May 16, 2005
* imdb name|id=0000845|name=Tallulah Bankhead