Gloria Hallward began performing on stage at the age of nine at
        the Pasadena Community Playhouse, and continued to act while at the
        Hollywood High School. In 1943 she made her Broadway d‚but and was
        signed to a film contract by M.G.M. the following year when she
        assumed the surname of Grahame.
            Her languid manner, seductive voice and pouting lips made her the
        most memorable screen floozie of the decade. In 1945 she married actor
        Stanley Clements and divorced him in 1947; in 1948 she married film
        director Nicholas Ray, became a mother in 1949 and then divorced in
        1952. Nicholas Ray directed her in "A Woman's Secret"; and, with
        Humphrey Bogart, she played in "In a Lonely Place".
            However, her divorce from Nicholas Ray was a serious emotional
        setback, and she was off-screen for two years. In 1952 in "Sudden
        Fear", she played the sulky moll for whom Jack Palance wants to murder
        Joan Crawford. In the same year she played with Gilbert Roland and
        Dick Powell in "The Bad and the Beautiful", for which she won a Best
        Supporting Actress Oscar.
            In 1954 she played, with Lee Marvin and Glenn Ford, in "The Big
        Heat". Also in 1954, after Barbara Stanwyck, Rita Hayworth and Olivia
        de Havilland had turned down the role, she played in "Human Desire".
        1954 was also the year in which she married her third husband, Cy
        Howard, an American comedy writer. They produced one daughter and
        then, in 1957, they divorced.
            In 1961 she married her former step-son, Anthony Ray, and they
        became the parents of two more children. However, this marriage also
        ended in divorce. In 1978 she came to Britain and played "Sadie
        Thompson" in Somerset Maugham's "Rain" at the Watford Palace Theatre,
        and in London in "A Tribute to Lily Lamont". In 1980 she played
        "Martha" in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" In 1981 she played in
        Tennessee Williams's "The Glass Menagerie". While touring in Lancaster
        she fell seriously ill and was flown back to the United States. She
        had been undergoing treatment for breast cancer, but died soon after
        arrival in New York, on 5 October 1981, aged fifty-seven.
        

(Charles Kidd, "Debrett Goes to Hollywood".)