I am working on a new video about Gail Russell. Gail’s story is a tragic one. She had no desire to be a Hollywood actress but was ‘discovered’ and became a star. However, she was comfortable with being out in front of the camera. She would learn that alcohol made it easier.

What seemed like the answer caused the young lady’s life to tumble downhill. Gail Russell died at the age of 36.

It is a sad story but here are a few newspaper articles I thought were interesting.

Just Like a Movie!

School Girl Still Amazed By
Sudden Fortune In Hollywood

HOLLYWOOD, June 8 – (UP) – Today we met a starlet movie actress. Eighteen years old Blue-eyed. Plucked out of high School by the picture makers. Taking her first big film role.

“And that wall of eyes behind the camera is what gets me,” reported Miss Gail Russell. “Hundreds of eyes gleaming in the dark, staring at me. Boring holes in me. Giving me the heebies.”

The camera roles up for a closeup and the lens works like a mirror and there’s one of her own eyes blinking at her.

“Horrible,” said Miss Russell. “I worry, worry, worry. In one month I’ve lost six pounds, worrying.”

Take this morning, Miss Russell was working with Ruth Hussey, Robert Milland and Donald Crisp in the ghost story “The Uninvited.” She has to run across the moor in front of the haunted house in a pair of blue shoes. The man said she had to have some blue shoes.

She rushed home during lunch hours for a pair of blue shoes, She returned at one p.m. lunchless. Another man had taken a pair of white shoes and feed them blue. He said he didn’t want Miss Russell’s shoes.

“I am just going around in circles,” she said. “Confused is the word. I was very happy when they gave me this part. Then they said I had 24 hours to get an English Accent. I got my English accent and the English coach said it was too English. I toned it down. Then the English coach had to take time off because she was having a baby, I suggested that she call it “The Uninvited.”

“By now, Lewis Allen, the director, was shooting the first scene on location. It was so windy they had to sew the back of my hat to my coat collar. and I was nervous and excited and Mr. Allen changed my accent again. By then I didn’t know how I was talking.”

Last June, it turns out, she was about to graduate from Santa Monica High School as a commercial artist. She had no thoughts of trying for a movie career.

So William Meiklejohn, the Paramount talent scout, was driving out Wilshire Boulevard, where he picked up a couple of hitch-hiking high school boys. Meiklejohn got t talking to his passengers and one thing led to another and one of the boys said he know a girl who ought to be in movies, Gail Russell.

“And I didn’t know anything about this,” Miss Russell said, “I was minding my own business, getting ready to graduate, and looking around for a job as an artist. It seems that there are serval girls named Russell at Santa Monica High School. Several days went by before I received a note a drawing class, saying from to get in touch with Paramount. I presumed it was a gag. Things like that always are happening in high school I knew the note in the waste basket.

“Then I got to wondering. After school, I dug into the waste basket. I got the note and I phoned Paramount and they did want to see me. I didn’t know whether to go or not. But I went. Mother came with me and we walked into this Mr. Meiklejohn’s office and I just didn’t know what to think.”

Paramount put miss Russell under contract in such a hurry she never did get to graduate. She went to the studio dramatic school because she’d never done any dramatics in her life. She played bits in two movies. She kept on studying acting.

Director Allen and Producer Charles Brackett tabbed her for this role, one of the important ones of the year, and all has been confusion inside Miss Russell’s pretty head ever since. There is no route she is a fortunate girl; yet you can’t help sympathizing with her.

Santa Monica Girl Gets Lead Role

Gail Russell, the “Hedy Lamarr of Santa Monica,” who was signed to a Paramount contract after a pair of youthful hitch-hikers had recommended her in glowing terms to casting director William Meiklejohn, has been cast in her first feature as Barbara, the 17-year-old high school beauty who takes Rand Brooks away from Ginger Rogers in “Lady in the Dark,” and thereby starts a series of psychological complications in the later’s life.

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