Stephen Michael Shearer

Gloria Swanson is most remembered today for her role as “Norma Desmond” in Billy Wilder’s noir sound classic Sunset Boulevard (1950), but Swanson during her heyday was heralded as filmdom’s leading fashion queen, as proclaimed by director Cecil B. DeMille in such silent motion pictures as ...

She was called “the most beauti­ful girl in the world,” and during Hollywood’s Golden Age of the 1930s and 1940s, she set standards of beauty and sophistication copied through­out the world during the three decades of her film career. When she made her American cinema debut opposite Charles Boyer...