Susan Hayward

Abstract

Although Susan Hayward began her movie career in the 1940s, her award-winning performances were in well-known postwar films like With a Song in My Heart (1952), I’ll Cry Tomorrow (1956), and I Want to Live! (1958). Contrasted with the wholesome girl next door living in comfortable suburbia, she was a headstrong, embittered, and volatile redhead from a poor neighborhood in Brooklyn. She should have been an inspiration for lower-class readers identifying with her, but she did not represent middle-class femininity, nor did she maintain appearances. She was neither polished nor polite. Rather, she was a feisty star who tested the limits of acceptable feminine behavior in a conventional and conformist society that subscribed to domestic ideology. Since fan magazines publicized stars in response to a constant polling of its readers, Hayward was not being typecast for popularity. As a result, Photoplay and Motion Picture published fewer stories about her. She won Photoplays Gold Medal Award in 1953 for her role as singer Jane Froman in With a Song in My Heart, a sentimental success story that momentarily won her fans, but the magazine never displayed her picture on its cover.¹ A few years later, Hayward received a third Academy Award nomination for portraying the blowsy, self-destructive, alcoholic singer, Lillian Russell, in I’ll Cry Tomorrow. But by then she herself had starred in too many lurid headlines that could not be rewritten to publicize her offscreen life as a model of domestic bliss.