She was born Tallulah Brockman Bankhead on 31 January 1902 in
Huntsville, Alabama, USA. Her father, William Brockman Bankhead, was a mover and shaker in the Democratic Party who served as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from June 4, 1936 to Sept. 16, 1940.
She began her stage career at age 15 after being educated in a convent. She did more stage work plus two silent films, then went to London in 1923 where she became a celebrity while performing brilliantly in a string of plays. The hot-blooded Bankhead preferred to live dangerously and became notorious for her uninhibited behavior (such as taking off her clothes in public). She lived for the moment and didn't even think of the consequences to her career.
She appeared in two British silents before returning to America in 1930; signed by Paramount, she began her movie career in earnest but remained more a fixture of Broadway, where she shone in plays such as The Little Foxes (for which she won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award in 1939, an award she won again in 1942 for The Skin of Our Teeth).
Her movie career was sporadic and included several box office disasters, perhaps because her extravagant, larger-than-life personality was not done justice on the screen; her more memorable appearances include a celebrated performance in Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944), for which she was cited by New York Film Critics.
Bankhead made only three more films after Lifeboat. She was divorced from actor John Emery in 1941. In 1952, she wrote her autobiography, Tallulah.
She died of pneumonia on 12 December 1968 in New York.
