Still, two things seem clear: the behavior that landed her in an insane asylum half a century ago would scarcely raise an eyebrow today and yet, had she not been institutionalized, she might well have been long forgotten. With the medical records closed and all the principal players long dead, little can be said with certainty about what really happened to Frances Farmer. Whatever the true story, it has been eclipsed by the mythology. Her rebellious spirit finally shattered, she leaves the institution an atomized half-woman, only a shadow of the vibrant artist she had once been. Together they force her into a state mental hospital, where she is brutalized by electric shock and other barbaric treatments raped by orderlies, fellow inmates, and soldiers from a nearby Army base and eventually lobotomized. The standard version of the Frances Farmer story goes like this: An idealistic young actress challenges the hypocrisy of her world and becomes the victim of a spiteful mother, a vengeful Hollywood, and a cabal of callous and arrogant psychiatrists. Since her death in 1970, however, she has become something of a cult figure, the subject of three books, three movies (the best known of which is the 1982 film Frances, starring Jessica Lange), several off-Broadway plays, scores of magazine articles, and a song, "Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle" by Kurt Cobain, which includes this line: "She'll come back as fire, to burn all the liars, and leave a blanket of ash on the ground."
Released in 1950, she spent the rest of her life in relative obscurity.
After a period of increasingly erratic behavior, she was declared legally insane and institutionalized in 1944. Talented and beautiful, Farmer was also willful, troubled, and self-destructive. Seattle-born actress Frances Farmer, a rising star in the 1930s, is remembered today more for her unfortunate life story than for her once promising career.
0 kommentar(er)
