Tallulah Brockman Bankhead (January 31, 1902 – December 12, 1968) was an American actress. Primarily an actress of the stage, Bankhead also appeared in several films including an award-winning performance in Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944). She also had a brief but successful career on radio and made appearances on television. In all, Bankhead amassed nearly 300 film, stage, television and radio roles during her career. She was posthumously inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1972 and the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame in 1981.
Bankhead was a member of the Bankhead and Brockman family, prominent politically in Alabama. Her grandfather and her uncle were U.S. senators, and her father was Speaker of the House of Representatives. Bankhead supported liberal causes, including the budding civil rights movement. She also supported foster children and helped families escape the Spanish Civil War and World War II.
Bankhead was an alcohol and drug user; she reportedly smoked 120 cigarettes a day and talked candidly about her vices. She also had a series of sexual relationships with both men and women.
Tallulah Brockman Bankhead was born on January 31, 1902, in Huntsville, Alabama, to William Brockman Bankhead and Adelaide Eugenia "Ada" Bankhead (née Sledge); her great-great-grandfather, James Bankhead (1738–1799) was born in Ulster, Ireland, and settled in South Carolina. Bankhead was named after her paternal grandmother, who in turn was named after Tallulah Falls, Georgia. Her father hailed from the Bankhead and Brockman political families, active in the Democratic Party of the South in general and of Alabama in particular. Her father was the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1936 to his death in 1940. She was the niece of Senator John H. Bankhead II and granddaughter of Senator John H. Bankhead. Her mother, Adelaide "Ada" Eugenia Sledge, was a native of Como, Mississippi, and was engaged to another man when she met William Bankhead on a trip to Huntsville to buy her wedding dress. The two fell in love at first sight and were married on January 31, 1900, in Memphis, Tennessee. Their first child, Evelyn Eugenia (January 24, 1901 – May 11, 1979), was born two months prematurely and had some vision difficulties.
The following year, Bankhead was born on her parents' second wedding anniversary, in a second-floor apartment in what is now known as the Isaac Schiffman Building, where her father also had his office. A marker was erected to commemorate the site, and in 1980 the building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Three weeks after Bankhead's birth, her mother died of blood poisoning (sepsis) on February 23, 1902. On her deathbed, Ada told her sister-in-law to "take care of Eugenia, Tallulah will always be able to take care of herself". Bankhead was baptized next to her mother's coffin.
William B. Bankhead, devastated by his wife's death, descended into bouts of depression and alcoholism. Consequently, Tallulah and her sister Eugenia were mostly reared by their paternal grandmother, Tallulah James Brockman Bankhead, at the family estate called Sunset in Jasper, Alabama. As a child, Bankhead was described as "extremely homely" and overweight, while her sister was slim and prettier. As a result, she did everything in her efforts to gain attention, and constantly sought her father's approval. After watching a performance at a circus, she taught herself how to cartwheel, and frequently cartwheeled about the house, sang, and recited literature that she had memorized. She was prone to throwing tantrums, rolling around the floor, and holding her breath until she was blue in the face. Her grandmother often threw a bucket of water on her to halt these outbursts.
Bankhead's husky voice (which she described as "mezzo-basso") was the result of chronic bronchitis due to childhood illness. She was described as a performer and an exhibitionist from the beginning, discovering at an early age that theatrics gained her the attention she desired. Finding she had a gift for mimicry, she entertained her classmates by imitating the schoolteachers. Bankhead said that her "first performance" was witnessed by the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur. Her Aunt Marie gave the brothers a party at her home near Montgomery, Alabama, in which the guests were asked to entertain. "I won the prize for the top performance, with an imitation of my kindergarten teacher", Bankhead wrote. "The judges? Orville and Wilbur Wright." Bankhead also found she had a prodigious memory for literature, memorizing poems and plays and reciting them dramatically.
Their grandmother and aunt were beginning to find the girls difficult to handle. Their father William, who was working from their Huntsville home as a lawyer, proposed enrolling them in a convent school (although he was a Methodist and her mother an Episcopalian). In 1912, both girls were enrolled in the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Manhattanville, New York. Their father remarried in 1915; as his political career brought him to Washington, they were enrolled in a series of different schools, each a step closer to Washington. When Bankhead was 15, her aunt encouraged her to take more pride in her appearance, suggesting that she go on a diet to improve her confidence. Bankhead quickly matured into a southern belle.
Bankhead was childhood friends with American socialite, later novelist, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, who married the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Beginnings in New York (1917–1922)
At 15, Bankhead submitted her photo to Picture Play, which was conducting a contest and awarding a trip to New York plus a movie part to 12 winners based on their photographs. However, she forgot to send in her name or address with the picture. Bankhead learned that she was one of the winners while browsing the magazine at her local drugstore. Her photo in the magazine was captioned "Who is She?", urging the mystery girl to contact the paper at once. Congressman William Bankhead sent in a letter to the magazine with her duplicate photo.
Arriving in New York, Bankhead discovered that her contest win was fleeting: she was paid $75 for three weeks' work on Who Loved Him Best and had only a minor part, but she quickly found her niche in New York City. She soon moved into the Algonquin Hotel, a hotspot for the artistic and literary elite of the era, where she quickly charmed her way into the famed Algonquin Round Table of the hotel bar. She was dubbed one of the "Four Riders of the Algonquin", consisting of Bankhead, Estelle Winwood, Eva Le Gallienne, and Blyth Daly. Three of the four were non-heterosexual: Bankhead and Daly were bisexuals, and Le Gallienne was a lesbian.
At the Algonquin, Bankhead befriended actress Estelle Winwood. She also met Ethel Barrymore, who attempted to persuade her to change her name to Barbara. Bankhead declined, and Vanity Fair later wrote "she's the only actress on both sides of the Atlantic to be recognized by her first name only."
Bankhead's father had warned her to avoid alcohol and men when she got to New York; Bankhead later quipped "He didn't say anything about women and cocaine." The Algonquin's wild parties introduced Bankhead to marijuana and cocaine, of which she later remarked "Cocaine isn't habit-forming and I know because I've been taking it for years." Bankhead did abstain from drinking, keeping half of her promise to her father.
In 1919, after roles in three other silent films, When Men Betray (1918), Thirty a Week (1918), and The Trap (1919), Bankhead made her stage debut in The Squab Farm at the Bijou Theatre in New York. She soon realized her place was on stage rather than screen, and had roles in 39 East (1919), Footloose (1919), Nice People (1921), Everyday (1921), Danger (1922), Her Temporary Husband (1922), and The Exciters (1922). Though her acting was praised, the plays were commercially and critically unsuccessful. Bankhead had been in New York for five years, but had yet to score a significant hit. Restless, Bankhead moved to London.