Virginia Grey

Virginia Grey is best known to Golden Age Hollywood fans for such films as The Women (1939), All That Heaven Allows (1955), and The Naked Kiss (1964). Her career spanned more than two hundred movie, theater, and television credits over the course of six decades, and she worked with some of the industry's most celebrated talents, including Joan Crawford, Red Skelton, Stanley Kramer, and the Marx Brothers. Born into a Hollywood family, Grey was a beautiful and confident actor who could adapt to a variety of genres from comedy to melodrama to film noir. She held stardom in the palm of her hand, but it was the one thing she didn't want.

Virginia Grey: Good Luck Charm explores her journey from studio contractee to independent freelancer alongside key developments in Hollywood's labor market. Author Olympia Kiriakou also details aspects of Grey's private life: growing up on studio sound stages, her romances with Clark Gable and Robert Taylor, her political activism, and her diverse business interests. Using original interviews, personal scripts, contracts, and other ephemera, Kiriakou argues that Grey's professional accomplishments and resistance to mainstream celebrity radically shift our perception of success in the classic Hollywood studio system. This first-ever biography of Virginia Grey seeks to popularize her contributions to the stage and screen, showing how she became her own good luck charm--and did so her own way.