Everybody agrees about her beauty, not everybody agrees about her acting. It had its high points, but she seems to have worked externally for the most part, calculating effects. She protected herself, and her movie star persona. That's what she was taught to do, and it was ingrained.
But that movie star persona was more than just beauty and glamour. Lana Turner doesn't have to impress you with her acting to break your heart. She just has to stay out of her own way. She has REAL star quality. You can't look at anybody else, and whatever she gives you, you want more.
You want the screen to fall away, the barrier to disappear. You want to BE with her, to KNOW her, to help her and take care of her and fix it for her. You desperately want her to be happy, and all right. That's a star.
Beauty is part of it, of course. No star was ever more unbelievably attractive. Cass Timberlane is the one I always think of, where her beauty is almost unbearable. But there's also vulnerability, and a generosity. Can you not hear her, after they say cut, asking if that was all right, if you liked that, if you want her to do it again? I can.
Even when she's playing a bad girl, Lana Turner wants you to be happy about it. She wants to share something with you, make you comfortable, give you a gift. She lets YOU into the part of her that wants to delight and enchant YOU.
As long as she does that, she doesn't have to delineate a character drastically unlike herself, or inhabit that character's depths. She has something of her own, in every picture, that you care about just as much as you care about any character in any picure she ever made. Who is LANA, you wonder? Is THIS woman Lana, the one she's playing?
Or was that more Lana in the last picture? Or will the part be perfectly Lana in the next one? In real life, she wasn't exemplary. But no matter what we know about her in real life, we no longer know it when she's on the screen. We know only what we're looking at, and wondering about, and that's all we want to know.
THAT is a movie star. There are a lot of actresses, many good ones, always a few great ones. We've seen many movie stars, too, by now. But GREAT movie stars have been very, very few. It's an honorable thing to be, and there's no need to quibble about her acting ability. The lady is immortal.
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***You must be old and wrinkled to have that type of reaction. - Liana***
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