A career that spans seven decades. Time to cross different ages of cinema and television. American actress Piper Laurie died on October 14 in Los Angeles (California). Rosetta Jacobs, her real name, was born in Detroit, Michigan, on January 22, 1932. Her parents were Jewish immigrants from Poland and Russia. His father worked as a furniture merchant.
At a very young age, she intended for a career as an actress and took drama lessons from the couple Benno and Betomi Schneider. His debut in cinema is like so many others. She was spotted by a Universal talent scout and, at the age of 17, signed a contract with the studio, which gave her her stage name, Piper Laurie. His first feature film for the cinema will be Louise (1950), a family comedy by Alexandre Hall. There she rubbed shoulders with the actor and future president of the United States Ronald Reagan (1911-2004), of whom she said, in a blunt autobiography, Learning to Live out Loud (“Learning to Live Out Loud,” Crown Archetype, 2011), that he was her first lover.
She will then appear in various films, typical of these works that Universal mass-produces: Francis at the races (1951, one of the titles featuring Francis, the talking mule!) by Arthur Lubin, The Thief of Tangier (1951) by Rudolph Maté, with Tony Curtis, Ali Baba’s Son (1952) by Kurt Neumann, still with Tony Curtis, The Legend of the Magic Sword (1953) by Nathan Juran, with Rock Hudson. However, two feature films stood out at the dawn of his career, two very successful bluettes, No Room for the Groom (1952) and Who has seen my beauty? (1952), directed by the man who would sign, at the end of the decade, some of the greatest Hollywood melodramas, Douglas Sirk (1897-1987).
During the 1950s, Piper Laurie was just a product of an industry that produced starlets on an assembly line. At Universal, advertising executives put out press releases saying she takes milk baths and eats flower petals to keep her skin soft. Later, Piper Laurie would remember this time with some bitterness. “No one thought of me as an actress. We simply remembered this advertisement around the fact that I chewed flower petals for breakfast. I even thought about giving up my stage name. »
Sudden breakthrough
After the end of her contract with Universal, she began a career in television, a medium then in full expansion. We see her in series like Robert Montgomery Presents (1950-1957), Front Row Center (1955-1956), Playhouse 90 (1956-1960), Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse (1958-1960), etc. It is Robert Rossen’s adaptation of a novel by Walter Tavis, The Scammer (1961), film noir about the descent into hell of a billiard player bluffing his opponents to better pocket their bets, which earned him real recognition.
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