“Tallulah Bankhead was an actress, free spirit, wit, Democrat, baseball fan, animal lover, drinker, bawdy shocker of prudes, scourge of bigots and hypocrites. The convent-reared Southern belle had a vocabulary that could bring blushes to the cheeks of stevedores. Her 50-year career in show business could be traced to a beauty contest win at 14 in her native Alabama. Her voice, the rich, deep, croaking contralto that said "Dahling" in a way unique to her, occasioned as much comment as her beauty and was an important element in her acting. Broadway columnist Earl Wilson once asked her if she was ever mistaken for a man over the telephone. "No," she answered, "were you?””
/ From the Los Angeles Times’ obituary for Tallulah Bankhead by Richard Dougherty in the 13 December 1968 edition /
Died on this day: debauched, bourbon-saturated wild woman of American stage and screen, the inspiration for Disney villainess Cruella de Vil AND Margo Channing in All About Eve (1950), (and the inspiration for legions of drag queens), that sophisticated lady with the soul of a hillbilly who once declared “I am the foe of moderation, the champion of excess” - Miss Tallulah Bankhead (31 January 1902 – 12 December 1968)! Later in life, when - in the words of her biographer Denis Brian - violently ravaged gardenia Bankhead looked “as though life had thrown her against a wall and she’d just covered up the scars with rouge and lipstick”, a fan stopped her on the street to ask, “Aren't you Tallulah Bankhead?” “I'm what's left of her, darling,” she responded. In 2024 I screened Bankhead’s final film – the underrated British-made horror flick Die! Die, My Darling! (1965) – at my monthly Lobotomy Room cinema club, and everyone present was mesmerised by her. Pictured: portrait of Bankhead in 1962.
