Lana Turner

Lana Turner was an American actress whose three-decade career made her one of the most-iconic faces of the Hollywood Golden Age — one of the foundational mid-20th-century American screen sex symbols. She was born Julia Jean Turner on February 8, 1921, in Wallace, Idaho. Her father was murdered in 1930 in San Francisco, and Lana was raised by her mother in difficult financial circumstances across multiple Western states before settling in Los Angeles.

Her discovery story has been widely retold — as a 16-year-old high-school student in 1937, she was reportedly noticed at a Sunset Boulevard malt shop by Hollywood Reporter publisher William R. Wilkerson, who introduced her to talent agent Zeppo Marx, who then connected her with director Mervyn LeRoy. LeRoy cast her in a small role in They Won't Forget (1937) — her tight-sweater walk down a Sunset Boulevard sidewalk in that film became one of the mid-1930s Hollywood-discovery moments.

Her commercial peak ran through the 1940s. Major roles included Honky Tonk (1941, opposite Clark Gable), Ziegfeld Girl (1941), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946, the film noir opposite John Garfield, where her white-shorts-and-turban first scene became one of the most-iconic American screen entrances of the 1940s), and The Bad and the Beautiful (1952, opposite Kirk Douglas). Her only Best Actress Academy Award nomination came for Peyton Place (1957).

Her personal life was shaped by the April 1958 stabbing death of her then-boyfriend Johnny Stompanato, a Los Angeles mob enforcer, by her 14-year-old daughter Cheryl Crane in their Beverly Hills home. The subsequent Los Angeles County coroner's inquest ruled the killing justifiable homicide. The case dominated American tabloid coverage for months and shaped Turner's subsequent career, though she continued working in film through the 1960s and on TV through the 1980s. She married eight times across her life. She died on June 29, 1995, in Century City, Los Angeles, at age 74, of throat cancer.

Her name Lana has multiple proposed origins, including a short form of Alana, a Slavic short form of Svetlana, or a Hawaiian word meaning "calm." Lana has been continuously among the most-popular American girls' names since the 2000s.