On her way to the Phillipines to meet with her father in 1915, she and her mother stopped off in Los Angeles. She decided to try the studios there, and at once managed to get noticeable roles, several of them in films with William Beery, whom she married in 1916. Most of her first films were slapstick comedies for Mack Sennett: she often said later on that she was so determined to be a dramatic actress that she always played dead straight, ,not realizing that the more genuine her emoting the funnier the final effect. In 1917 she decided to move away from Sennett, and found herself employed at a new studio, Triangle, starring in a series of dramas about marital misunderstandings and the mishaps of courting couples. They had titles like Society for Sale, Everywoman's Husband, Shifting Sands and Wife or Country (all 1918), and in most of them she starred opposite her boyish partner from Sennett days, Bobby Vernon. Although she was playing drama she became restive of the restrictions at Triangle and was eager to take up an offer to star in a Cecil B. Demille film, but Triangle prevented her on a contract technicality. In 1919 she was finally free to go over to Paramount and the first film she made there was Dont Change Your Husband (1919), one of his biggest successes.

Youthful Old-Timer

Thus at the age of 20 Gloria Swanson became an 'important star', with five years experience already behind her. 'Working for Mr Demille', she recalls in her autobiography, Swanson on Swanson, 'was like playing house in the world's most expensive department store'. If this is taken to mean that there was a lot of getting elaborately dressed in Swanson-Demille films that is quite possible, for at this time, DeMille was going through his period of specialization in 'mature', sophisticated society dramas. In Don't Change Your Husband, for instance, Swanson plays the wife who does, only to discover at the end that the first husband was better than the alternative, who proves to have a roving eye. In For Better, For Worse (1919) she is a woman who wrongly believes her husband to be a coward, but experience showed otherwise. And both films had comfortingly happy endings.

But the best and most famous of the six films she made in a row for DeMille was Male and Female (1919), a free version of J.M Barrie's The Admirable Crichton which gave scope for grand society goings-on at the beginning, drama in the shipwreck, comedy on the island and the a bitter-sweet conclusion back in Mayfair - plus a typical DeMille dream-scene set in ancient Babylon, with Swanson being sacrificed to the lions. This was one of the peaks of her career. Otherwise her roles became rather repetitious as she suffered in gorgeous gowns through Why Change Your Wife?, Something to Think About (both 1920), and finally The Affairs of Anatol (1921), where she had mainly to wait at home while vamps like Bebe Daniels had all the fun with tame cheetahs and the like.

Changing Affairs

It was time for DeMille and Swanson to part company and it was in The Great Moment (1921) she was handed on to Sam Wood, a director who was to guide her way through a string of ten films. For this one, which was actually made before The Affairs Of Anatol, she first received top billing above the title, and had the story especially devised for her by Elinor Glyn, the great resident expert in high passion and higher society. In her later Sam Wood films she ranged from heavy suffering in Under The Lash through further problems in Don't Tell Everything (1921), and an extra marital relationship opposite Rudolph Valentino in Beyond the Rocks (1922), to the light comedy of the French farce Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (1923). By this time she was the top star at Paramount, and her 1923 contract was almost without parallel in the powers it gave her to choose her own films. This she used to good effect in order to vary her roles constantly: Zaza (1923), a strong story of the French music-hall was followed by other such as Manhandled (1924), directed by Allan Dwan, in which she gives a brilliantly funny performane as a gum chewing shop girl who finds out that society life is not all that it is supposed to be, and Wages of Virtue (1924), in which she surpassed even her own previous extravaganzas by wearing a wedding dress allegedly worth $100,000.

In 1925 she insisted on going to France to make Madame Sans-Gene on the right locations under the directions of a real Frenchman, Leone Perret, and returned with a real Marquis (de la Falaise de la Coudraye) as a husband. In her autobiography she gives a frightening account of her apparently triumphant return to America - after a near-fatal abortion in a Paris hospital - but the film was another career highpoint. After four more films she left Paramount to set up her own production company (with the help of her then lover Joseph Kennedy), and began with The Love of Sunya (1927), which was something of a misfire, and Queen Kelly (1928), which was never properly finished due to Stroheim's extravagances and the inopportune arrival of sound. Two other pictures, however, were complete triumphs: she played a briefly reformed prostitute in the tropics in Sadie Thompson (1928), her last silent film, and in the The Trespasser (1928) she wowed audiences by not only talking but singing too.

Comedy Comebacks

After that her career went rapidly downhill through four wishy-washy comedies, the last of which A Perfect Understanding (1933),was shot in Britain and co-starred a very young and inexperienced Laurence Olivier. There followed contracts with MGM and Columbia; ambitious projects were announced, but none was fulfilled, and the only film she did make, Music in The Air (1934) when on loan to Fox, was a flop. Her first official comeback, a comedy with Adolphe Menjou, Father Takes a Wife (1941) did not do much better. Finally in 1950 Billy Wilder, after thinking of Pola Negri, Mary Pickford, Mae Murray and various other silent movie stars, settled for her in Sunset Boulevard. She portrays an ex-movie queen, from the silent era, who is adamant that with the help of an out of work screenwriter (William Holden) she will make a dramatic comeback. But she becomes jealous of his girlfriend and eventually murders him. Even as she is being taken away by the police she believes she is making a triumphant return to superstardom.

The rest is history.She then made only a few more films, a negligible farce, Three for Bedroom C (1952); a rather funnier parody costume epic, Mio Figlio Nerone (1956, Nero's Weekend), in which she was a redoubtable Agrippina to Alberto Sordi's Nero; a stint as one of the long suffering airline passengers in Airport 1975; and Killer Bees (1974) for television and several stage appearances as well as numerous chat shows, discussing life and diet, her career and her book. She really did not have to do anything more: she was more than a star; she was a legend. Norma Desmond says defiantly in Sunset Boulevard 'We had faces then!' Gloria Swanson always did.