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Today is the birthday of movie actor Alan Ladd,
who was an American actor and film producer. Ladd found success in film
in the 1940s and early 1950s and was often paired with Veronica Lake in films noir, such as This Gun for Hire (1942), The Glass Key (1942), and The Blue Dahlia (1946).
Ladd was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas,
on September 3, 1913. On July 3, 1918, the five year-old Alan
accidentally burned down the family home while playing with matches. In
the early 1920s, Ladd's family moved to
California. They lived in a migrant camp in Pasadena, California, at first and then moved to the San Fernando Valley. He enrolled in North Hollywood High School
on February 18, 1930, became a high-school swimming and diving
champion and participated in high-school dramatics in his senior year,
including the role of Ko-Ko in The Mikado which was seen by a talent scout.
He got regular professional acting work only when he turned to radio. Ladd
had worked to develop a rich, deep voice ideal for that medium, and in
1936, he was signed by station KFWB as its sole radio actor. One night he was playing the roles of a father and son on radio when he was heard by an agent, Sue Carol.
She was impressed and called the station to talk to the actors, and was
told they were only one person. She arranged to meet him, and
impressed by his looks, she signed him and promoted her new client in
films and on
radio. Ladd's first notable part under Carol's management was the 1939
film Rulers of the Sea at $250 per week. He also received attention for a small part in Hitler – Beast of Berlin (1939). He had a small, uncredited part in Citizen Kane, playing a newspaper reporter toward the end of the film.
Paramount knew it had a potential star and announced Ladd's next film, an adaptation of the Dashiell Hammett story, The Glass Key (1942) with Brian Donlevy and Veronica Lake.
Ladd's cool, unsmiling, understated persona proved popular with wartime audiences, and he was voted by the Motion Picture Herald as one of the 10 "stars of tomorrow" for 1942. Paramount was delighted. The majority of stars were earmarked from wherever
they came; if it seemed unlikely that public acceptance would come with
one film, they were trained and built up: The incubation period was
usually between two and five years. As far as Ladd was concerned, he was
a small-part actor given a fat part faute de mieux, and after
his second film for them, he had not merely hit the leading-men
category, but had gone beyond it to films which were constructed around
his personality. His salary was raised to $750 per week.
He starred in China (1943) with Loretta Young for director John Farrow,
with whom Ladd made a number of movies. Young did not like working with
Ladd: "I found him petulant... I don't remember hearing him laugh, or
ever
seeing him laugh. Everything that concerned him was very serious... He
had a certain screen personality... but as an actor... I never made any
contact with him. He wouldn't look at me. He'd say "I love you...", and
he'd be looking out there some place. Finally, I said "Alan, I'm
he-ere!!"... I think he was very conscious of his looks. Alan would not
look beyond a certain point in the camera because he didn't think he
looked good."
He enlisted for military service on January 19, 1943. While
he was in the armed services, a number of films that had been announced
for him were postponed and/or made with different actors but he was
reportedly receiving 20,000 fan letters per week. The New York Times
reported that "Ladd in the brief period of a year and with only four
starring pictures to his credit... had built up a following unmatched in
film history since Rudolph Valentino skyrocketed to fame." In December 1943, he was listed as the 15th-most popular star in the U.S.
When Ladd returned from the army, Paramount announced a series of vehicles for him, including And Now Tomorrow and Two Years Before the Mast.
In 1945 Paramount commissioned Raymond Chandler to write an original screenplay for him titled The Blue Dahlia, made relatively quickly in case the studio lost Ladd to the military once again.
The Blue Dahlia was released to great acclaim (Chandler was nominated for an Oscar for the screenplay), quickly followed by Two Years Before the Mast. The two films were solid hits, each earning over $2 million in rentals in the U.S. and Canada; Two Years Before the Mast was a blockbuster, earning over $4 million and ranking among the top-10 most popular films of the year. Ladd's roles in This Gun for Hire, The Glass Key, and The Blue Dahlia, firmly established him as a no-nonsense tough guy in a popular genre of crime films later to become known as film noir.
In
1950, the Hollywood Women's Press Club voted Ladd the easiest male star
to deal with in Hollywood. The following year, a poll from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association listed Ladd as the second-most popular male film star in the world, after Gregory Peck.
The Blue Dahlia plot
When a former bomber pilot (Alan Ladd) comes home from the war, he finds his wife kissing her substitute boyfriend (Howard Da Silva),
the owner of the Blue Dahlia nightclub. When she also confesses that
her drunkenness caused their son's death, he walks out on her, but later
she is found dead and he becomes the prime suspect.
Viewfinder links:
Howard da Silva.
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