In 1949, Life magazine published a picture of aspiring starlets. Their careers are pretty much the variety of careers you’d expect. One is so obscure I can’t find anything about her; she may have changed her name after the picture was taken. Several have Standard Fifties Starlet Careers. One, Cathy Armstrong, is on the schedule for October. One, listed as Sonia Soma, is Enrica Soma, who didn’t have much of an acting career but married John Huston and was Anjelica Huston’s mother. He apparently saw her in the picture and began pursuing her. One is today’s honoree, Lois Maxwell, and in the average picture of 1949 starlets she’d probably be the best known, but front and center in the picture is Marilyn Monroe.
Maxwell is another on our long list of people whose parents opposed their career. She actually initially ran away from home during World War II to join the Canadian Women’s Army Corps. She was fifteen, a fact they didn’t discover until the acting troupe she’d been assigned to reached the UK. Instead of being sent back to Canada, she was discharged and enrolled in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. It was there that she first met her longtime costar, Roger Moore. They became lifelong friends.
Initially, her career was exactly the sort of most of those other starlets in that picture. She did win the Most Promising Newcomer Golden Globe, that strangest of awards, for That Hagen Girl, with Ronald Reagan, Shirley Temple, and Rory Calhoun. However, it didn’t lead to much in the way of good roles, and she ended up living in Rome for five years, among other things appearing in a version of Aida with then-unknown Sophia Loren. She met and married Peter Marriott and had two children, but he had a massive coronary and was unable to work, leaving her as the family’s primary breadwinner.
In 1962, she went after a role in Dr. No. Terence Young, the director, apparently said that she “looked like she smelled of soap.” But she was offered either Sylvia Trench, the first Bond Girl, or Moneypenny. Sylvia Trench had what Wikipedia describes as “a revealing scene” (I don’t like Bond movies, and I’m not sure I’ve seen Dr. No), and Maxwell wasn’t interested in that. But Moneypenny was a guaranteed two days of work at a hundred quid a day, even if she had to provide her own costume. She would have a total of about seventeen minutes of screen time across fourteen movies.
So okay, because I don’t like Bond, I don’t really think of her from the actual Bond movies. Sorry. I’ve also seen the weird Italian rip-off Bond movie a lot, because it’s on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. That’s just how my thinking goes, and I can’t help that. I will say I was delighted to discover that she spent many years writing a column of her own where she kind of rambled about whatever struck her fancy to write about. I have never related to one of my honorees so hard.
And, yes, here’s the picture. The information I have says that the women were “brought together” by Philippe Halsman, and we know the picture is from Life.
