Frances Farmer was an American stage and screen actress, but she is best known for the various accounts of her often horrific life story, including a 1982 movie, Frances, starring Jessica Lange. Hailing from a solid middle class background in Seattle, Frances made an early sensation in Hollywood in the 1930s in such films as Rhythm on the Range and Come and Get It, but she never cottoned to the way of life in the movie industry. She went to New York and starred in Clifford Odets’ play, Golden Boy, for The Group Theater in 1937. She conducted a love affair with the married Odets, which ended disastrously for her. Returning to Hollywood, she intended to carve out time for stage work as well as film, but her increasing alcoholism and erratic behavior stymied her career in all directions. She embarked on a downward spiral of arrests, breakdowns, psychiatric hospitalizations (some involuntary) and received diagnoses of schizophrenia and resultant electroshock therapy (that much-vaunted lobotomy never happened). After being released to her mother’s care in 1950, Frances went on to petition for and was granted her civil independence in 1953. She went on to relative success in television and summer stock and wrote her autobiography, but soon re-experienced some of her earlier mental problems. Frances died of cancer in 1970, leaving no children after three marriages, and only sparse evidence on film of the truly luminescent being she once was.
