Evelyn Louise Keyes (November 20, 1916 – July 4, 2008) was an American film actress. She is best known for her role as Suellen O'Hara in the 1939 film Gone with the Wind.

Early life Evelyn Keyes was born in Port Arthur, Texas,Hollywood Remembered to Omar Dow Keyes and Maude Ollive Keyes, the daughter of a Methodist minister. After Omar Keyes died when she was three years old, Keyes moved with her mother to Atlanta, Georgia, where they lived with her grandparents. According to her memoir, Keyes was sexually molested by one of her brother's friends when she was five years old. As a teenager, Keyes took dancing lessons and performed for local clubs such as the Daughters of the Confederacy.

Film career

A chorus girl by age 18, Keyes came out to Hollywood and was introduced to Cecil B. DeMille who in her own words "signed me to a personal contract without even making a test".Interview with Johnny Carson, The Tonight Show, July 28, 1977 After a handful of B movies at Paramount Pictures, she was cast in Say It in French (1938). However, Keyes had to drop out to have an abortion and was replaced by Olympe Bradna. Later, she auditioned for the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939). Though she failed to get the part, Selznick was impressed by her Southern accent and cast her as Scarlett O'Hara's sister Suellen in January 1939.

Columbia Pictures signed her to a contract. In 1941, she played an ingenue in Here Comes Mr. Jordan. She spent most of the early 1940s playing leads in many of Columbia's B dramas and mysteries. She appeared as the female lead opposite Larry Parks in Columbia's blockbuster hit The Jolson Story (1946). She followed this up with an enjoyable minor screwball comedy, The Mating of Millie, with Glenn Ford. She was then in a 1949 role as Kathy Flannigan in Mrs. Mike.

While under contract at Columbia, Keyes had long complained about the lack of challenging roles offered to her. When Sam Spiegel had bought the story for the film noir thriller The Prowler, John Huston (Spiegel's partner at Horizon Pictures) thought it would be the perfect project for Keyes, his then estranged wife, who went on to star in the 1951 movie alongside Van Heflin. Keyes felt it to be the best role and performance of her career. Keyes' last role in a major film was a small part as Tom Ewell's vacationing wife in The Seven Year Itch (1955). Keyes officially retired in 1956, but continued to act.

Personal life In her autobiography Scarlett O'Hara's Younger Sister: My Lively Life In and Out of Hollywood, Keyes described being sexually harassed by her director Andrew Stone while working on Say It in French. She soon found out she was pregnant (presumably by her boyfriend Barton Bainbridge), and had an abortion before filming of Say It in French resumed. She wasn't at her best on set, and Stone humiliated her for her poor work. She was fired from the picture, replaced by Olympe Branda.

Only weeks later, she was cast in Gone With the Wind. She married Barton Bainbridge shortly after. Bainbridge was an alcoholic, and threatened Keyes with a gun on at least one occasion. They separated and in 1940, he committed suicide with a shotgun in her car, leaving a note. Keyes wrote: "The note said it was because I had left him. I never left a man again. I made them leave me."

Later, she married and divorced director Charles Vidor (1943–1945), actor/director John Huston (23 July 1946 – February 1950), and bandleader Artie Shaw (1957–1985). Keyes said of her many love affairs: "I always took up with the man of the moment and there were many such moments." During her marriage to Huston, the couple adopted a twelve-year-old Mexican child, Pablo, whom Huston had discovered while filming on location in Mexico for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. In her memoir, Keyes claimed that her adoptive son sexually molested her and that they lost contact after only a few years.

Keyes expressed her opinion that Mrs. Mike was her best film. Among her many love affairs in Hollywood she recounted in Scarlett O'Hara's Younger Sister, were those with film producer Michael Todd (who left Evelyn for Elizabeth Taylor), actors Glenn Ford, Sterling Hayden, Dick Powell, Anthony Quinn, David Niven and Kirk Douglas. She had to regularly fend off Columbia Pictures studio head Harry Cohn's advances during her career at the studio.

Keyes died of uterine cancer on July 4, 2008 at the Pepper Estates in Montecito, California, and was cremated. Half her ashes were sent to Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas and the rest were divided among relatives and buried in a family plot at Waco Baptist Church Cemetery, Waco, Georgia, with a small tombstone bearing the epitaph Gone with the Wind.

Filmography

Excluding appearances as herself.

Film Year Title Role Notes 1938MadeleineSons of the LegionLinda Lee 1939Sudden MoneyMary PattersonUnion PacificMrs. CalvinGone with the WindSuellen O'HaraSlightly HonorableMiss Vlissigen 1940Francois MorestanBefore I HangMartha GarthBeyond the SacramentoLynn Perry 1941Helen WilliamsHere Comes Mr. JordanBette LoganLadies in RetirementLucy 1942Ruth MorleyFlight LieutenantSusie Thompson 1943Allison McLeodDangerous BlondesJane CraigThere's Something About a SoldierCarol Harkness 1944Nine GirlsMary O'RyanStrange AffairJacqueline 'Jack' Harrison1945Babs 1946RenegadesHannah BrockwayVicki DeanJulie Benson1947Johnny O'ClockNancy Hobson 1948Millie McGonigleEnchantmentGrizel Dane 1949Mr. Soft TouchJenny JonesMrs. MikeKathy O'Fallon Flannigan1950Sheila Bennet 1951Smuggler's IslandVivian CraigSusan GilvrayIron ManRose Warren Mason 1952One Big AffairJean HarperIt Happened in ParisPatricia Moran 1953Rough ShootCecily Paine99 River StreetLinda James1954Hell's Half AcreDonna Williams 1955Top of the WorldVirgie RayneHelen Sherman1956Around the World in 80 DaysCameo appearance1987Mrs. Axel1989Wicked StepmotherWitch Instructor

Television Year Title Role Notes1951Lux Video TheatreJaneEpisode: "Wild Geese"1955Climax!Drusilla CayleyEpisode: "Wild Stallion"1968PlayhouseMrs. PanzackEpisode: "A Matter of Diamonds"1968Mrs. BlairEpisode: "Visitors from a Strange Planet"1971From a Bird's Eye ViewMrs. BealEpisode: "The Matchmakers"1983Mrs. ParkerEpisode: "Bricker's Boy/Lotions of Love/The Hustlers"1985, 1987, 1993Murder, She WroteEdna, Sister Emily, Wanda PolaskiEpisodes: "Sticks & Stones", "Old Habits Die Hard", "Dead to Rights"1986Amazing StoriesEvelyn ChumskyEpisode: "Boo!"

Bibliography

References

External links

Evelyn Keyes, Actress in 'Gone with the Wind' dies at 91 New York Times Biography

Photos of Evelyn Keyes in 'The Jolson Story' 1946 by Ned Scott