When we think about the quote from In a lonely place —“I was born when she kissed me, I died the day she abandoned me and I lived as long as she loved me”—but there is another film and another quote that defines the personality of one of the most fascinating actresses of classic Hollywood. In The bribed (1953), masterpiece of cinema noir directed by , Grahame is Debby Marsh, the foul-mouthed girlfriend of Lee Marvin’s gangster, whose face is disfigured when he burns it with scalding coffee.
Grahame’s character and his spectacular dramatic arc were sealed in this film and in a memorable sequence in which Debby, now with a disfigured face, goes to meet the prosecutor’s widow played by Jeanette Nolan. With half her face bandaged and the rest of her body covered with a mink coat, Grahame’s character addresses the other woman, also covered in fur, and from her fragile mischief she proclaims that, although it may not seem like it, they are “sisters under the mink.” The flighty Debby is the perfect anti-heroine of a film who surrenders to a secondary female character who steals all the limelight from her co-stars.
Grahame, who was married to Nicholas Ray and years later also to her stepson Tony Ray, had a high-profile romance in the late 1970s with a young aspiring English actor, Peter Turner, whose memoirs were recently adapted to the screen in Movie Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, with the actress playing the diva.
Grahame died of cancer in 1981 at age 55. Under his aura of femme fatale There was hidden an actress capable of overcoming fashions and the passage of time. In The Bribed, Lee Marvin mocks Debby with a phrase from Genesis: “Six days a week you shop and on the seventh, rest.” For half the movie, she is just a girl who has managed to escape poverty with a boyfriend who mistreats her, but in the end we learn that something else hides beneath her vision. With her scarred face, in an unforgettable close-up, Debby says something that could also define the elusive Gloria Grahame: “A scar isn’t so bad if it’s just one side of your face. You can always go through life on its side.”
