“Would you like to be in the movies?” a stranger asks the 15-year-old girl sipping a Coke in a cafe near her Hollywood school. “I don’t know. I’d have to ask my mother,” she ingenuously replies.
This, Lana Turner later recalled, was how her career began.
Turner (1921-1995) has a fair claim as the first modern celebrity film star, and her private life was every bit as turbulent and colourful as the plot lines in her most outrageous on-screen melodramas. Long before the tabloid frenzy surrounding Angelina Jolie and Lindsay Lohan, Turner was obsessed over by gossip columnists as much as she was by film critics, who often sneered at her.
