ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the shadow of mental illness in narratives surrounding two ‘minor’ actresses, Dorothy Hale and Peg Entwistle. Both women committed suicide in spectacular fashion in the 1930s, actions that were seen to derive from career disappointment. Each women’s death was assured ongoing notoriety when it subsequently became aligned with a specific cultural artefact: Entwistle’s with the ‘Hollywoodland’ sign from which she leapt to her death in 1932; and Hale’s with Frida Kahlo’s painting The Suicide of Dorothy Hale (1938). This chapter examines the actual achievements of Entwistle and Hale; the circumstances surrounding their deaths; and the ways those deaths were reported and memorialised. Narratives around Entwistle and Hale are focussed on their seeming failure, so that these actresses become emblematic of ‘lack,’ of potential never realised, promise unfulfilled. In part, their failure is attributed to these women’s supposed mental fragility; as such, their stories also operate as warnings about acting as a profession that can foster vulnerability.
