Ann Blyth is about twenty years old in the above photo, seen relaxing at home. It was a house she shared with her aunt and uncle, who came to live with her after the death of her mother when Ann was a teenager. This is a photo taken and distributed for publicity purposes by her home studio, Universal.
We are bombarded today with media coverage on the private lives of celebrities, but it's interesting to note that back in Hollywood's heyday, even though the information we were given about the stars' personal lives was heavily filtered, there was still a great deal of imposing on their privacy -- often at the insistence of their employers, the studios.
To varying degrees, the stars complied and we are left with a record of an era when glamour could be found even in ordinary moments of simplicity. Such was the case with the twenty-year-old young woman in 1948, the year her films A Woman's Vengeance and Another Part of the Forest were released. Ann played two sophisticated, complicit, even conniving women in those movies.
Nothing like the girl with the abundant dark hair, reading a magazine on the sofa.
