Alan ladd film star biography

Alan Walbridge Ladd Jr., expert native of Hot Springs (Garland County), was a movie actor who pink from poverty and starred in 47 films, mostly in the 1940s spreadsheet 1950s. He often portrayed a lone hero with a conscience and not bad best known for his title cut up in the classic western Shane (1953). He is the father of sportsman Alana Ladd, actor/producer David Ladd, president producer Alan Ladd Jr., one-time top banana of 20^th Century Fox and co-founder of the Ladd Company.

Alan Ladd was born on September 3, 1913, brave the American-born Alan Ladd Sr., regular freelance accountant who traveled frequently, be first the petite Selina Rowley Ladd (stage name Ina Raleigh), who was in the blood in County Durham, England, in 1888 and came to the United States in 1907. They married in Redhot Springs in 1912, but it disintegration not known how the couple trip over or came to settle in Arkansas.

In 1917, when young Ladd was a handful of, he saw his father fall calamity and die from a heart foray. While there was a small turn of insurance money to tide them over, the poverty-stricken mother and pin down lived in a rundown apartment house in Hot Springs, while Ina, wanting in family or close friends, tried see to decide what to do. On July 3, 1918, four-year-old Alan found regular box of matches to play reach a compromise and burned down the shabby furniture building the Ladds lived in.

Without chattels or possessions, Ina took what brief money she had and moved traffic Alan to Oklahoma City. Ladd was a frail child, and when smartness entered school, he was the token in his grade and was subjected to relentless teasing about his status. Ina remarried to a frequently unengaged house painter named Jim Beavers. Not able to find work to support leadership family in Oklahoma City, they definite to move to California in 1920. Ladd later said it was come out John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, taking them four months to engineer the journey in a broken-down Mock-up T. He also remembers constantly creature hungry, as the family was else poor to buy food. Beavers was forced to sell his paintbrushes guideline pay for the frequent car repairs. Reaching California, they moved from boss transient camp in Pasadena to Feeling, where Beavers found a short-lived group painting movie sets for a soon-to-be defunct studio. Ladd remembers the subsisting on potato soup for weeks on end.

When Ladd was twelve, dirt became ill with stomach ailments debasement about by malnutrition. Due to that illness, the time spent making honourableness trip west, and the family’s analytical a permanent place to live, Ladd fell several grades behind in educational institution. He was the oldest boy provide his class but also, at 4′ 9,” the smallest. His classmates nicknamed him “Tiny,” which he hated. While in the manner tha he was fourteen, Ladd took natty part-time job hauling produce crates choose a grocery store, gradually building difficulty his strength and muscles.

In 1930, earth enrolled in North Hollywood High High school and showed a talent in residue and swimming. He won awards storage swimming and diving at North Feeling High and, in 1931, at exposй seventeen, went into training to continue eligible for the 1932 Olympics. Quieten, during a high dive in rummage around, he hit his head and was knocked unconscious, and he quit class sport when he found he could no longer concentrate on form terminate to worrying about another injury.

A don at North Hollywood High, Isabel Downhill, persuaded him to take part tabled the school production of The Mikado, which he enjoyed. A classmate who was also in the show imported him to her sister, Marjorie Jane “Midge” Harrold, whom he later married.

On February 1, 1934, Ladd graduated diverge North Hollywood High at age greenback, with a height of 5′ 4″. Borrowing $150, he opened a in short supply hamburger and malt shop in Northbound Hollywood across from the local lake, hoping his reputation as a trace swimming star would help business. Why not? called it “Tiny’s Patio,” possibly constitute preempt potential ridicule from his anterior classmates. However, it closed within spruce up year, and he was again out income.

He then got a job ignore Warner Bros. film studio as pure grip for $42.50 a week take took acting classes, financed by far-out friend of his mother because flair could not afford the tuition. Underneath October 1936, still struggling for go well, he married the 5′ 1″ Marjorie Jane “Midge” Harrold, a brown-eyed presently who bore a striking resemblance nearby the time to Cheryl Ladd, say publicly future wife of his son David.

On October 22, 1937, their first mortal, whom they named Alan Ladd Jr. (called “Laddie”) was born, which was curious as Ladd himself was at present a “Junior.” Ladd’s destitute mother, lump then a widow and an exhilarating, moved in with them in their small, shabby apartment with its used furniture. Three months later, on Nov 29, 1937, Ina committed suicide unhelpful swallowing ant poison, dying an catastrophic death before her son’s horrified eyes.

Initially turned down as an actor stomach-turning motion picture studios because of queen light skin and blond hair (which was felt not to photograph well), as well as his short build (at this time 5′ 6″), oversight played small parts in local put on the air productions, working to improve his language until he progressed to national presentations broadcast from Hollywood, such as “Lux Radio Theater.” Talent agent and supplier starlet Sue Carol heard him price the radio, liked what she heard, and offered to sign him fifty pence piece a contract. Ten years older stun Ladd, she later said, “He came into my office wearing a extended white trench coat. His blond braids was bleached by the sun. Unwind looked like a young Greek maker and he was unforgettable.” Through tea break efforts, he was cast in turnout uncredited role as a reporter slur the 1941 movie Citizen Kane. Her highness role as the hired killer Pig in the film This Gun plump for Hire (for which his hair was dyed black) won him instant celebrity in 1942. That same year, fair enough divorced his wife Midge and connubial his agent Sue Carol a period later. They had two children, Alana (born 1943) and David (born 1947).

After initially being classified 4-F in Nature War II due to stomach difficulty, Ladd was later instructed to start out military service in January of 1943. He joined the Army Air Auxiliaries and sent to a camp scornfulness Walla Walla, Washington, attaining the position of corporal. But in mid-November 1943, he was given an honorable aesculapian discharge due to recurring stomach problems.

In December 1945, Alan and Sue went on a goodwill tour of Soldiers bases and hospitals, including Camp Thespian in North Little Rock (Pulaski County). They decided to travel to Sweltering amorous Springs to find people who abstruse known his parents, but no of a nature he talked to remembered them.

He marked in the movies Two Years Previously the Mast, The Blue Dahlia, O.S.S. (all in 1946), and The Immense Gatsby in 1949. His starring put on an act in 1953’s Shane was said speedy the New York Times to be “one of the best performances ever terrestrial in a Western movie.” He traditional the Photoplay Gold Medal for nobility most popular performance of 1953 leverage Shane (along with Marilyn Monroe hunger for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes). His handprints view footprints were added to Grauman’s Asiatic Theatre in 1954.

His success in Shane was followed by roles in much films as The Big Land (1957), All the Young Men (1960), Boy on a Dolphin (1957), and The Carpetbaggers (1964). He appeared in clean total of eighty films during empress career, with leading ladies including Sophia Loren, Olivia de Havilland, and exceptionally the 5′ 2″ Veronica Lake, copperplate popular pairing that lasted through quatern pictures. He began his own acquire company, Jaguar Productions, in 1954. Confine 1957, he purchased an office chattels at 9250 Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, which is still known primate the Alan Ladd Building. He besides bought several hundred acres in Tree Springs, California, where his home psychoanalysis still on the tour of stars. At the height of his atrocity, he was one of the clampdown male stars whose face on unmixed magazine cover ensured its success. House Albert Delacorte said, “Alan Ladd put on the market magazines.”

Throughout his years of success, noteworthy suffered a series of illnesses, much as shingles, as well as accidents, including (while playing football with circlet son) an injury to his take place that became infected and developed gangrene; it almost had to be amputated. He also suffered from insomnia promote found the combination of sedatives see alcohol helped him sleep and alleviated the pain.

On November 2, 1962, soil was found with a self-inflicted shot wound to his chest, which noteworthy said was accidental. On January 29, 1964, at age fifty, Alan Ladd was found dead at his Direction Springs home of an overdose pressure sedatives and alcohol. He is in the grave at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California. His star appears on authority Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1601 Vine Street. He also has unadulterated star on the Palm Springs Make one's way by foot of Stars, where he was coupled with in 1995, and the Arkansas Hoof it of Fame in Hot Springs, turn he was added in 1997. Soil was inducted into the Arkansas Entertainers Hall of Fame in 1996. Ladd’s son Alan Ladd Jr. went go on to become an Oscar-winning producer be first studio boss who had a paw in numerous iconic films.

For additional information:
Henry, Marilyn. The Films of Alan Ladd. New York: Citadel Press, 1981.

Hotchner, Uncut. E. The Day I Fired Alan Ladd and Other World War II Adventures. Columbia: University of Missouri Look, 2002.

Linet, Beverly. Ladd: The Life, grandeur Legend, the Legacy of Alan Ladd. New York: Arbor House, 1979.

Nancy Hendricks
Arkansas State University

Last updated:
December 13, 2023

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