Astor was born in
Quincy, Illinois, the only child of Otto Ludwig Wilhelm Langhanke and Helen Marie de Vasconcellos. They married on August 3, 1904, in
Lyons, Kansas. Astor's father taught German at Quincy High School until the U.S. entered
World War I. Later on, he took up light farming. Astor's mother, who had always wanted to be an actress, taught drama and elocution. Astor was
home-schooled in academics and was taught to play the piano by her father, who insisted she practice daily. Her piano talents came in handy when she played piano in her films
The Great Lie and
Meet Me in St. Louis. In 1919, Astor sent a photograph of herself to a beauty contest in
Motion Picture Magazine, becoming a semifinalist. When Astor was 15, the family moved to Chicago, Illinois, She made her debut at age 14 an exponent of
Francesco Lamperti, but no roles were offered. Her acting career was then given a boost by her friend,
Florence Eldridge, (wife of
Fredric March), in whom she confided. Eldridge, who was to star in the stage play
Among the Married at the
Majestic Theatre in
Downtown Los Angeles, recommended Astor for the second female lead. The play was a success, and her voice was deemed suitable, being described as low and vibrant. She was happy to work again, but her happiness soon ended. On January 2, 1930, while filming sequences for the Fox movie
Such Men Are Dangerous, Kenneth Hawks was killed in a mid-air plane crash over the
Pacific. Astor had just finished a matinee performance at the Majestic when Florence Eldridge gave her the news. She was rushed from the theatre to Eldridge's apartment. A replacement,
Doris Lloyd, stepped in for the next show. Astor remained with Eldridge at her apartment for some time, then soon returned to work. Shortly after her husband's death, she debuted in her first talkie,
Ladies Love Brutes (1930) at Paramount, in which she co-starred with her friend
Fredric March. While her career picked up, her private life remained difficult. After working on several more movies, she suffered delayed shock over her husband's death and had a
nervous breakdown. During the months of her illness, she was attended to by Dr. Franklyn Thorpe, whom she married on June 29, 1931. That year, she starred as Nancy Gibson in
Smart Woman, playing a woman determined to retrieve her husband from a gold-digging flirtation. In May 1932, the Thorpes purchased a yacht and sailed to Hawaii. Astor was expecting a baby in August, but gave birth in June in
Honolulu. The child, a daughter, was named Marylyn Hauoli Thorpe: her first name combined her parents' names, and her middle name is Hawaiian (Hau'oli is a Hawaiian word that means joyful, happy, full of delight). When they returned to
Southern California, Astor freelanced and gained the pivotal role of Barbara Willis in
MGM's
Red Dust (1932) with
Clark Gable and
Jean Harlow. In late 1932, Astor signed a featured player contract with Warner Bros. Meanwhile, besides spending lavishly, her parents invested in the
stock market, which often turned out unprofitable. While they remained in Moorcrest, Astor dubbed it a "white elephant," and she refused to maintain the house. She had to turn to the
Motion Picture Relief Fund in 1933 to pay her bills. She appeared as the female lead, Hilda Lake, niece of the murder victims, in
The Kennel Murder Case (1933), co-starring with
William Powell as detective
Philo Vance. Film critic
William K. Everson pronounced it a "masterpiece" in the August 1984 issue of
Films in Review. Soon unhappy with her marriage, due to Thorpe having a short temper and a habit of listing her faults, by 1933 Astor wanted a divorce. At a friend's suggestion, she took a break from movie-making in 1933 and visited New York alone. While there, enjoying a whirlwind social life, she met the playwright
George S. Kaufman, who was in a strong, but open marriage. She documented their affair in her diary. Thorpe, by now making use of his wife's income, discovered Astor's diary, and told Astor that her liaisons with other men, including Kaufman, would be used in any divorce proceeding to support the charge that she was an unfit mother.
Custody case Thorpe divorced Astor in April 1935. Astor's diary was never formally offered as evidence during the trial, but Thorpe and his lawyers constantly referred to it, and its notoriety grew. Astor admitted that the diary existed and that she had documented her affair with Kaufman, but maintained that many of the parts that had been referred to were forgeries, following the theft of the diary from her desk. The diary was deemed inadmissible as a mutilated document because Thorpe had removed pages referring to himself and had fabricated content. The trial judge,
Goodwin J. Knight, ordered it sealed and impounded.
Florabel Muir, then with the
New York Daily News, is known to have invented fabricated diary passages in her articles. After
Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), the studio allowed her to debut on Broadway in
Many Happy Returns (1945). The play was a failure, but Astor received good reviews. On loan-out to
20th Century Fox, she played a wealthy widow in
Claudia and David (1946). She was also loaned to
Paramount to play Fritzi Haller in
Desert Fury (1947), the tough owner of a saloon and casino in a small mining town. Before Helen Langhanke died of a heart ailment in January 1947, Astor said she sat in the hospital room with her mother, who was delirious and did not know her, and she listened quietly as her mother told her all about terrible, selfish Lucile, referring to Astor by her birth name. After her death, Astor said she spent countless hours copying her mother's diary so she could read it and was surprised to learn how much she was hated. At MGM, Astor continued being cast in undistinguished, colorless mother roles. One exception was when she played a prostitute in the
film noir Act of Violence (1948). The last straw came when she was cast as Marmee March in
Little Women (1949). Astor found no redemption in playing what she considered another humdrum mother and grew despondent. She later described her disappointment with her cast members and the shoot in her memoir
A Life on Film: The studio wanted to renew her contract, promising better roles, but she declined the offer.
Middle years '' (1947) At the same time, Astor's drinking was growing troublesome. She admitted to
alcoholism as far back as the 1930s, but it had never interfered with her work schedule or performance. She hit bottom in 1949 and went into a sanitarium for alcoholics. In 1951, she made a frantic call to her priest and said that she had taken too many sleeping pills. She was taken to a hospital and the police reported that she had attempted suicide, this being her third overdose in two years. The story made headline news. She maintained it had been an accident. That same year, she joined
Alcoholics Anonymous and converted to
Roman Catholicism. She credited her recovery to a priest, Peter Ciklic, also a practicing
psychologist, who encouraged her to write about her experiences as part of therapy. She also separated from her fourth husband, Thomas Wheelock (a stockbroker she married on Christmas Day 1945), but did not actually divorce him until 1955. In 1952, she was cast in the leading role of the play
The Time of the Cuckoo, which was later made into the movie
Summertime (1955), and subsequently toured with it. After the tour, Astor lived in New York for four years and worked in the theater and on television. Her TV debut was in
The Missing Years (1954) for
Kraft Television Theatre. She acted frequently in TV during the ensuing years and appeared on many big shows of the time, including
The United States Steel Hour,
Alfred Hitchcock Presents,
Rawhide,
Dr. Kildare, ''
Burke's Law, and Ben Casey. In 1954, she appeared in the episode "Fearful Hour" of the Gary Merrill NBC series Justice in the role of a desperately poor and aging film star who attempts suicide to avoid exposure as a thief. She also played an ex-film star on the Boris Karloff-hosted Thriller'' in an episode titled "Rose's Last Summer." Astor starred on Broadway again in
The Starcross Story (1954), another failure, and returned to southern California in 1956. She then went on a successful theatre tour of
Don Juan in Hell directed by
Agnes Moorehead and co-starring
Ricardo Montalbán. Astor's
memoir,
My Story: An Autobiography, was published in 1959, becoming a sensation in its day and a bestseller. It was the result of Father Ciklic urging her to write. Though she spoke of her troubled personal life, her parents, her marriages, the scandals, her battle with alcoholism, and other areas of her life, she did not mention the movie industry or her career in detail. In 1967, a second book was published,
A Life on Film, where she discussed her career. It, too, became a bestseller. Astor also tried her hand at fiction, writing the novels
The Incredible Charley Carewe (1960),
The Image of Kate (1962), which was published in 1964 in a German translation as
Jahre und Tage, ''The O'Conners
(1964), Goodbye, Darling, be Happy
(1965), and A Place Called Saturday'' (1968). Astor appeared in several movies during this time, including
Stranger in My Arms (1959). She made a comeback in
Return to Peyton Place (1961) playing Roberta Carter, the domineering mother who insists the "shocking" novel written by Allison Mackenzie should be banned from the school library, and received good reviews for her performance. According to film scholar Gavin Lambert, Astor invented memorable bits of business in her last scene of that film, where Roberta's vindictive motives are exposed.
Final years and death After a trip around the world in 1964, Astor was lured away from her
Malibu, California home, where she was gardening and working on her third novel, to make what she decided would be her final film. She was offered the small role as a key figure, Jewel Mayhew, in the murder mystery
Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), starring her friend
Bette Davis. She filmed her final scene with
Cecil Kellaway at
Oak Alley Plantation in southern Louisiana. In
A Life on Film, she described her character as "a little old lady, waiting to die." Astor decided it would serve as her
swan song in the movie business. After 109 movies in a career spanning 45 years, she turned in her
Screen Actors Guild card and retired. Astor later moved to
Fountain Valley, California, where she lived near her son, Anthony del Campo (from her third marriage to Mexican film editor
Manuel del Campo), and his family, until 1971. That same year, suffering from a chronic heart condition, she moved to a small cottage on the grounds of the
Motion Picture & Television Country House, the industry's retirement facility in
Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, where she had a private table when she chose to eat in the resident dining room. == Filmography ==