She is the only Quebecer to have won an Oscar for acting. She was a six-time Academy Award finalist in the same decade, including twice in 1930 for the Best Actress Oscar, which she won ahead of Greta Garbo and Gloria Swanson. In 1938, she won the Best Actress Award at the Venice Film Festival.
Posted at 7:15 a.m.
And yet, few Quebecers remember Norma Shearer, who would have turned 120 this week. She was born on August 10, 1902 in Montreal. She attended Westmount High School, like Leonard Cohen. When her father, owner of a building materials company at the corner of Shearer and Saint-Patrick streets in Pointe-Saint-Charles, went bankrupt, her parents separated and her mother decided to leave Montreal. with her daughters for New York. Norma was 18 years old.
After having made the figuration, in particular in Way Down East by D. W. Griffith (with her younger sister Athole, first wife of filmmaker Howard Hawks), she was noticed by producer Irving Thalberg, who offered her a contract in Hollywood. After the creation of MGM studios in 1924, Norma Shearer established herself as one of its biggest stars.
Five years later, Norma Shearer married Irving Thalberg, who in the meantime had become Hollywood’s most powerful film producer while she herself was its most popular star. Some are jealous of her and derisively nickname her the “First Lady” of MGM. Her great rival Joan Crawford would even have said: “How can I compete with her? She sleeps with the boss! »
It is not her husband, but it seems her older brother Douglas Shearer, a pioneer in sound recording, who helps the actress the most to negotiate the turn of the end of silent cinema, by teaching her to modulate his voice. Douglas Shearer, who stayed in Montreal with his father after his mother left, was an Oscar finalist 21 times and won seven statuettes.
Norma Shearer, who has starred in more than 50 films, was a star in a very special time in Hollywood, before the imposition of the Hays Code (1934-1966), a strict moral code which strongly suggested that productions refrain from criticizing religion and showing on screen scenes of nudity, alcohol consumption, even mixed relationships or excessively languorous kisses.
“He was a very big star. She was the Rolling Stones while Greta Garbo was the Beatles,” Mick LaSalle, critic at the San Francisco Chroniclewhose test Complicated Womenabout Hollywood actresses of the early 1930s, focuses on Norma Shearer.
Censors found Norma Shearer more subversive than Marlene Dietrich. She often embodied the “modern woman”, rebellious, sexy and unconventional. She chose roles that were complex in terms of morality and sexual mores, despite her husband’s reservations.
Irving Thalberg, perhaps to discourage her, reportedly told her that she didn’t have enough sex appeal for the lead role in The Divorcee by Robert Z. Leonard, which he wanted to give to Joan Crawford. She had to hire a photographer without her knowledge and take daring photos of her to convince him.
In The Divorcee, her character Jerry realizes that her husband is cheating on her, after three years of marriage. She in turn cheats on him with his best friend. ” I’ve balanced our accounts she told him. He does not take it and demands a divorce. So she multiplies the conquests by denouncing these two weights, two measures.
The wildly popular and surprisingly modern and feminist film for its time won Norma Shearer the Oscar for Best Actress (she was also in the running for Their Own Desire). She had managed to rally the critics while making it acceptable for a woman to have sex outside of marriage in the cinema, without losing the sympathy of the public.
At the peak of her career, Norma Shearer was earning over US$300,000 a year. But after the sudden death of her husband from a heart attack in 1936, at the age of 37, with two dependent children, she considered giving up the profession and even refused the role of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Windfor which Vivien Leigh will receive an Oscar.
She gets two more citations at the Academy Awards, for Romeo and Juliet and Marie Antoinettemega-production of 2.5 million which in 1938 earned him the Best Actor Award at the Venice Film Festival (it is better than the film, a kitsch puff).
Norma Shearer is retiring at just 40. Suffering from Alzheimer’s, she died on June 12, 1983, of pneumonia, in Los Angeles. More or less forgotten, at least in his native Quebec. And if she had been called Normande Charron, would we remember her better? I bet yes.