Since the weekend I've been less than 100% health-wise so I passed some time watching a few old black and white films. One featured Constance Smith. Not being a film buff I'd never heard of her and I'm not particularly interested in actors anyway but for some reason a brief biography caught my eye.
Strikingly attractive, but troubled Irish leading lady of the 1950's, born to a struggling family in Limerick. Constance's is, perhaps, one of the more lurid and tragic tales of a promising career ending up on the skids. It began with her winning a 1946 look-alike competition in a Dublin movie magazine, touting her as a dead ringer for Hedy Lamarr. A successful screen test with the Rank Organisation followed...
Briefly in the limelight as a presenter at the 1952 Academy Awards, she was featured in a string of B-movies, including Red Skies of Montana (1952), Treasure of the Golden Condor(1953) and the thriller Man in the Attic (1953). Whether too emotionally frail to mount the pressures of stardom, or simply not talented enough to be thought of as star material, Constance never made it beyond leading lady status...
in 1962 and 1968, she was twice sentenced to brief prison terms for attempting to stab her partner, the well-known documentarist and film historian Paul Rotha. She also tried several more times to kill herself. Her last decades were spent, dissipated, in and out of hospitals. When able to get herself together for brief periods, she worked as a cleaner. Constance died, in obscurity, as an alcoholic on a street in Islington, London. A sadder end is hard to imagine.
From the brink of Hollywood stardom to an alcoholic's death on a street in Islington - that's a hell of a way to fall.
4 comments:
Blimey! Islington, she was really posh then!
Having been a street drinker in both Wallingford and Islingon in the 80s it is not unlikely I may have, quite literally, stumbled across her and never realised. That is a sobering thought...if I hadn't been sober this last decade already.
For every "Star" there are a thousand others. The hardest hit would those who came near but did not quite make the last lap. It might have been worse, she might has descended to the level of being a member of the Islington Labour Party that chose a certain person to be the Labour candidate. My memory of Islington in the past when looking for digs was that it was a patch to avoid, it is only recently that the monied have arrived.
Scrobs - maybe that was the problem, too posh to help a derelict.
Jack - you may well have met her, but would you have believed her story if she'd told it to you?
Demetrius - yes, at least she didn't do as much harm as the Islington Labour Party.
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