Book Review: Hollywood’s Hard-Luck Ladies

HOLLYWOOD’S HARD-LUCK LADIES: 23 ACTRESSES WHO SUFFERED EARLY DEATHS, ACCIDENTS, MISSTEPS, ILLNESSES AND TRAGEDIES was written by longtime Classic Images writer Laura Wagner.

The book was published by McFarland in 2020, and I bought it immediately. Since it first arrived I've dipped into several chapters as the interest struck, beginning with favorite Susan Peters, but I decided to complete reading the book in its entirety on my recent summer vacation.

The book’s biographies, each running several pages, remind me of the style of the James Robert Parish biographical books I loved in my earliest years as a classic film fan. Each chapter sketches an actress’s life and includes a filmography.

As all of the ladies written about are sadly long gone, Wagner relies heavily on contemporaneous news stories; occasionally, as in the cases of Peters (seen at right) and Mary Castle, she was able to glean information from relatives.

Wagner writes in her introduction that she feels that using articles of each actress's time helps make clear how they were perceived during their careers, rather than how they are assessed in retrospect.

Those familiar with Wagner’s work for Classic Images know she’s an exacting book reviewer, and I felt the book lives up to her own standards, being extremely readable, packed with information and interesting photographs.

The stories told are, as the title indicates, necessarily sad, but I learned a great deal. Some of my favorite chapters, besides Peters and Castle, were on Patricia Dane, Rita Johnson, Suzan Ball, Helen Walker, and Dorothy Dell.

It was admiring Dell in LITTLE MISS MARKER (1934), seen here with Adolphe Menjou and Shirley Temple, which prompted me to pull this book off the shelf and give it a thorough cover-to-cover reading.

For ease of reference for those interested in the book, the other actresses covered not already mentioned above are Lynne Baggett, Helen Burgess, Susan Cabot, Mae Clarke, Dorothy Comingore, Sidney Fox, Charlotte Henry, Mayo Methot, Marjie Millar, Mary Nolan, Lyda Roberti, Peggy Shannon, Rosa Stradner, Judy Tyler, Karen (Kaaren) Verne, and Constance Worth.

The book is a paperback which is 225 pages, including the index and an extensive list of references for each chapter.

Despite the sad overarching theme, I enjoyed the book and recommend it to anyone interested in the actresses profiled.

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