Hollywood Photo Archives - LIFE

LIFE Debuts Digital Jigsaw Puzzles With ZiMAD

Taylor Gilkison — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 18:05:55 +0000

Content from LIFE becomes available on Jan 25—free for all players!

ZiMAD, a mobile game developer, has announced a partnership with LIFE, the world-renowned magazine. In its first collaboration with a digital puzzle and gaming company, the LIFE Picture Collection will be sharing highlights from its vast and important photographic archive. And Magic Jigsaw Puzzles players will be able to relive the most spectacular moments in history, piece by piece.

LIFE’s debut features one of the most famous stars of the 20th century: Marilyn Monroe. You will find colorful and creative images by LIFE photographers Alfred Eisenstaedt, Ed Clark, JR Eyerman, Michael Rougier and more featuring the world’s most famous blonde in the new puzzle set.

“We are happy that now our players have the unique opportunity to ‘witness’ the greatest events and plunge into the heart of history by playing their favorite puzzle game,” said ZiMAD CEO Dmitry Bobrov. “Magic Jigsaw Puzzles is the world’s largest digital collection of puzzles, and LIFE is one of the greatest private photographic archives in the United States. Through digitalization, such a partnership contributes to sharing of the cultural heritage of an entire generation.”

The new LIFE-themed puzzle sets will be free for all players. ZiMAD is also planning to update the collection with more images from the LIFE archive.

Collect your first puzzle now:
Google Play Store
App Store

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LIFE’s Best Photos of Warren Beatty on the Rise

Thu, 30 Mar 2017 09:00:41 +0000

It may be hard to believe these days, but Warren Beatty wasn’t always Hollywood royalty.

But, as LIFE described in a major feature about Beatty that ran in April of 1968, there was a moment when it seemed that his burgeoning career might fade. In 1961, he had broken into the business with a star turn in Splendor in the Grass from filmmaker Elia Kazan with a script by William Inge and, as LIFE pointed out, “you cannot break in much higher than that.” But he had followed that film with movies that were less than spectacular hits, and his reputation as a headstrong on-set personality and a headline-making celebrity serial monogamist (of whom LIFE declared that “the radiance of unquestioned virility pours out” when he smiled) threatened to overshadow his actual work.

All that changed with Bonnie and Clyde, the 1967 movie in which he starred with Faye Dunaway.

But it wasn’t just the movie itself that set Beatty right. With low expectations for its success, the studio buried its release in its calendar. The initial response from critics and audiences was middling. It was then that Beatty accomplished the remarkable feat of convincing the public to reconsider. In fact, TIME essentially reviewed the picture twice, first as a “strange and purposeless mingling of fact and claptrap” in August of 1967 and a few months later, in a cover story, as “the sleeper of the decade,” noting that the first review had made a “mistake.”

By the time it was nominated for Best Picture, Beatty was set. Here’s a look back at LIFE best portraits of the star from the 1960s and ’70s.

Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood, 1961.

Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock images

Warren Beatty with Natalie Wood at the 1962 Academy Awards ceremony at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Warren Beatty, 1967.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Original caption: “Enchanting his audience, Beatty is a gracious award winner at a dinner given by the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures, which picked Bonnie and Clyde as the best picture of 1967.”

Bob Gomel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Warren Beatty at the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures in 1967.

Bob Gomel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Warren Beatty at the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures in 1967.

Bob Gomel / LIFE Picture Collection via Shutterstock

Warren Beatty, 1967.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Warren Beatty on the phone as he campaigns for Sen. George McGovern’s democratic presidential nomination, 1972.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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A Star at Ease: Bette Davis Before the “Feud” Years

Fri, 17 Mar 2017 12:00:08 +0000

“There are not many actresses who will come right out with the truth,” wrote LIFE’s Los Angeles correspondent Alice Crocker in notes accompanying a 1947 photoshoot, “when that means admitting a birthdate of April 5, 1908.” Bette Davis, frank and relatively unaffected throughout her career, was one of the few. Her freewheelingness and seeming lack of concern for her image shows through in this photoshoot, taken months after the birth of her daughter and three years before the first of her comebacks, as (ironically enough) a vain actress in the film All About Eve.

Davis in 1947 was not yet the hardened warrior of FX’s 2017 miniseries Feud (in which Susan Sarandon portrays the early-1960s Davis as a star fueled by nicotine and resentments, aware both of the status she’s earned and how little it’s respected). These photos show someone fully in control of herself, but far more at ease than the Davis who made What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? such a lurid hit. The setups are startlingly intimate: Davis seems not at all to be playing to the camera even when obviously posing with her husband, William Grant Sherry. She’s lost in reverie, or selling us on the idea that she is.

The notes make clear just how difficult living in the public eye could be, even in a far less media-saturated age than our own. “There are not many people (much less actresses) with figures to worry about who at 39 would be willing to go thru [sic] the effort of having a baby,” wrote Crocker. “However, the common rumor is that she has wanted a baby for some time and husband number three was acquired for that specific purpose.” (She notes, without apparent irony, that this has “a malicious note which can probably be discredited.”) Davis seems unconcerned with such speculation, even as she is opening her life to magazine cameras. Sitting on the wheel of a plane, she smokes in a pantsuit and loafers and looks away from us, as though something enticing were happening just out of frame.

These pictures depict her at a time when age, she freely admitted, was catching up with her, limiting the roles she could agree on with her studio, Warner Brothers. But she was at the beginning of something, too, having only just become a mother and putting the pieces together for an unlikely second act, one that capitalized on her skill at framing herself inthe right light. The year after these photos were taken, Davis’s June Bride would stanch some of the wounds her career had sustained after successive flops; then, in 1950, All About Eve relaunched her as a grande dame of the screen.

The Eve role used what was best of Davis’ star persona but refracted it through the cinematic style of the time, putting hauteur and intellect in an Edith Head gown. Later on, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? was a “vanity-free” performance whose ghoulishness only emphasized the still-radiant beauty of the off-screen Davis, and got her plenty of accolades for her bravery.

Davis would divorce Sherry—who in these photos seems unmoved by the camera’s gaze even as he shows off his well-developed physique—in 1950, the year of Baby Jane’s release, and marry Gary Merrill, her All About Eve costar. The spuriousness Crocker put forward in her notes was fair (if sharply worded). But Sherry barely registers in the photos—it’s all, always, about Bette, who manages to make you feel as though you’re intruding on private moments even with all the stage-management of a photoshoot around her. It’s another brilliant performance.

Bette Davis in California, 1947.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bette Davis with her dog in California, 1947.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bette Davis in California, 1947.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bette Davis and her third husband, artist William Grant Sherry.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bette Davis and her third husband William Grant Sherry at the beach in California, 1947.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bette Davis and her third husband William Grant Sherry boating in California, 1947.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bette Davis, her husband William Grant Sherry, and their boxer, 1947.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bette Davis and her third husband, William Grant Sherry, at the beach in California, 1947.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bette Davis worked at her desk at home in California, 1947.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bette Davis and William Grant Sherry played billiards at home in California, 1947

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bette Davis and her third husband, William Grant Sherry, at home in California, 1947.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bette Davis at home in California, 1947.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bette Davis in front of a plane with her third husband, William Grant Sherry, who was studying to become a pilot under the G.I. Bill.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bette Davis, 1947.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The post A Star at Ease: Bette Davis Before the “Feud” Years appeared first on LIFE.

King Kong: When the Awesome One Showed His Might

Fri, 10 Mar 2017 10:00:33 +0000

When King Kong was introduced the world in 1933, TIME described the creature as a “gigantic whatnot resembling an ape, 50 feet tall, equipped with large teeth and a thunderous snarl.” (His fur, the story noted, was made of 30 bearskins.) The whole concept of the film could have produced something entirely ridiculous, the magazine observed back then as well as in future stories about the franchise, but somehow it worked thanks to some Hollywood alchemy that filmmakers are hoping to recapture once again.

That means there have been plenty of chances for audiences to be reintroduced to Kong.

Case in point: In 1952, LIFE dispatched Alfred Eisenstaedt to photograph a screening of that original 1933 film, images from which can be seen here. The story did not run in the magazine at the time—in fact, no record could be found of why the magazine sent the photographer to that particular event or what editors intended to do with the images. It seems likely, however, that what Eisenstaedt was capturing was a screening from the theatrical reissue of the film that year, which was a prime example of the character’s proven staying power in action.

It was, as TIME described, a hit:

Hollywood, frantically casting about for a movie formula which will bring customers back into the theaters, last week agreed that one studio at least had struck pay dirt. After thriftily digging into its storehouse of possible reissues, RKO dusted off the 19-year-old King Kong, the adventures of a snarling, 50-ft. prehistoric monster who saved RKO from bankruptcy in the thirties and seems destined to gross at least $2,500,000 for his masters in 1952.

As most of Hollywood’s producers watched with envious amazement, crowds in Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati and Indianapolis flocked to see Kong brought back alive from a Pacific island to Manhattan, where he climbs the Empire State Building clutching the beauteous and screaming Fay Wray (now fortyish and retired). There, raging defiantly at his puny pursuers, the monster finally gets shot down by a squadron of ancient biplanes.

That 1952 take was significant (about $22.9 million in 2017 dollars), so it was perhaps no wonder that when the concept got yet another go in 1976, the images Eisenstaedt created in 1952, of a 1933 movie, were used to illustrate TIME’s cover story about the movie.

“[The original] achieved the legendary status of classic kitsch, the charm of which remained undimmed by innumerable el cheapo rip-offs and overexposure on TV. The great monkey has become a pop culture staple in everything from cartoons to ad campaigns,” the story observed.

As that place in pop culture endures, LIFE presents this look back at the staying power of the King Kong iteration that remains the monster’s milestone achievement.

Photo from a 1952 screening of the 1933 film King Kong

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock.

Photo from a 1952 screening of the 1933 film King Kong.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock.

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Sidney Poitier: Actor and Activist

Fri, 17 Feb 2017 12:00:29 +0000

In 1959, when LIFE magazine profiled the star of a new production of A Raisin in the Sun, Sidney Poitier, he was 32 and as the magazine then put it, “already accepted almost without question as the best Negro actor in the history of the American theater.” In the months leading up to that assessment, Poitier had played Porgy in Porgy and Bess and become the first black actor nominated for a Best Actor Oscar, for his work in The Defiant Ones. (He lost that time around but would win a few years later for Lilies of the Field.)

“Whenever Poitier walks on stage, excitement walks on with him,” wrote entertainment editor Tom Prideaux. “He seems to be taking it easy most of the time but with the hidden tension of a coiled spring. In appearance he veers between man and boy. His open grin and handsomely boyish head set off a powerful body. He can be as appealing as a child or show a shattering range of deep adult emotion. Today, acting and Poitier seem made for each other.”

Poitier died on January 6, 2022 at the age of 94. Here, LIFE presents some of the magazine’s most striking images of the star, who appeared in its pages in a 1950 story about the film No Way Out, went on to be featured on the cover in 1966 and became a mainstay of the magazine’s coverage of Hollywood as well as the civil rights movement. As these pictures make clear, Poitier’s career has been one of breadth as well as depth.

“It has been a long journey,” as Poitier said when he accepted his Oscar in 1964, “to this moment.”

Sidney Poitier in a scene from the film “Cry The Beloved Country”, 1952.

Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sidney Poitier at the prayer pilgrimage in Washington D.C., 1957.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sidney Poitier with his wife at home, 1959.

Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sidney Poitier in the play “A Raisin in the Sun”, with Ruby Dee, 1959.

Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sidney Poitier in “A Raisin in the Sun,” 1959.

Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The “Raisin in the Sun” party at Sardis with Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier, 1959.

Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sidney Poitier in a scene from “Porgy and Bess,” 1959.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Folk singer Odetta at a civil rights rally at the Statue of Liberty with Sidney Poitier, 1960.

Al Fenn The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sidney Poitier spoke at a pre-Inaugural gala for President John F. Kennedy, 1961.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, 1963.

Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sidney Poitier in a TV program, “Strolling Twenties,” a story about Harlem of that era, 1965.

Henry Groskinsky The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sidney Poitier during the filming of “The Lost Man,” 1968.

Charles Bonnay The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

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Betty Grable Was Famous For Her Legs. Here’s What She Thought About That

Fri, 16 Dec 2016 09:00:08 +0000

When Betty Grable was profiled in the June 7, 1943, issue of LIFE, she shared headline status with another entity: her own legs, which the magazine dubbed a “major Hollywood landmark.” The previous February, an impression of her leg had been immortalized in the cement in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater, and the limbs were reportedly insured for $1 million at one point.

In fact, the published photo essay was nearly all legs. The face of the actress was seen in only one of the 14 pictures that accompany the story. Here, Grable’s face has been restored to several of them.

And, while Grable clearly knew that her legs had helped make her famous, the LIFE profile hints that even in 1943 the reduction of a woman to one body part—and not her brain—could rub the wrong way. As the magazine reported, her first jobs in Hollywood had involved merely posing for publicity stills or standing in as a leggy extra. Her breakthrough into starring roles was delayed by her studio’s focus on her lower-half looks. And she maintained a humorously pragmatic attitude about the whole thing.

“They are fine for pushing the foot pedals in my car,” Grable told LIFE.

Original caption: “The legs at work on the set. They are clad in this costume in Betty’s latest screen appearance, Coney Island, a picture which dwells on them at considerable length.”

Walter Sanders The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Original caption: “The legs relaxing. Betty is athletic, but she does not have to take special exercises or massages to keep her figure shapely.”

Walter Sanders The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Betty Grable, 1943.

Walter Sanders The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Betty Grable getting cold cream applied to her legs by LIFE photographer Walter Sanders as he prepares her for a photo session at studio.

Walter Sanders The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Original caption: “Betty poses the legs for a still shot on a studio beach set. She has made more such leg art stills than any other actress.”

Walter Sanders The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Original caption: “Going to studio in the morning, Betty steps into roadster. Once asked to comment on her hips, well displayed here, she said, `They’re just where my legs hook on.'” “

Walter Sanders The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Betty Grable, in her dressing room at 20th Century-Fox studios, pulled on black mesh stockings for a scene that would feature her famous legs, 1943.

Walter Sanders The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Betty Grable, 1943.

Walter Sanders The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Original caption: “In the course of a day Betty’s legs walk, climb stairs, dance and are generally flexed like other legs. Here the legs are shown as she prepares morning shower at home.”

Walter Sanders The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Impression of Betty’s leg made in court of Grauman’s Chinese Theater. “Thanks Sid” is addressed to Mr. Grauman.

Walter Sanders The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Betty Grable’s Legs

Walter Sanders The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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