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Dig A Hole: Evelyn Keyes

July 12th, 2008 by Scott Marks

Evelyn Keyes & Van Heflin in Joseph Losey’s The Prowler (1951)

Evelyn Keyes, whose four tempestuous marriages and affairs with Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn and producer Michael Todd frequently eclipsed her acting career, died of uterine cancer at her home in Montecito on July 4. The news was withheld until a death certificate was issued. She was 91.

Professionally, Ms. Keyes was best known for playing Scarlett O’Hara’s sister Suellen in Gone With The Wind, but it was her marriages to Barton Bainbridge (1938 - 1940), director Charles Vidor (1943 - 1945), John Huston (1946 - 1950) and Artie Shaw (1957 - 1985) transformed her into the stuff gossip columns are made of.

“I have no roots,” she told The New York Times in 1977. ”I deliberately set out to destroy them, and I did. If there’s any such thing as a hometown for me, it’s Hollywood. I was formed here as an adult.”

Ms. Keyes was born in Port Arthur, Texas, in 1916, and later moved to Atlanta where she grew up fatherless and poor. A striking blonde with a comely figure, she began her career dancing in nightclubs and set her sites on Hollywood at the tender age of 17.

In 1999, Keyes told an interviewer, “To become a big movie star like Joan Crawford you need to wear blinders and pay single-minded attention to your career. Nobody paid attention to me, including me. I was the original Cinderella girl, looking for the happy ending in the fairy story. But my fantasy prince never came.”

She was discovered by Cecil B. DeMille who signed her to a seven-year contract and cast her in his 1938 pirate epic The Buccaneer. She appeared in five bit roles for Paramount and a featured part in DeMille’s Union Pacific before gaining Hollywood immortality as Scarlett’s younger sister in Gone With the Wind.

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