When the director married the actress

A director shouts “Action!” In front of him stands his wife. How is she going to respond? Will she say, “Yes, sir, no sir, three bags full, sir” or will she be difficult? Will she freeze?

Some people perform better at their chosen avocations when their loved ones are watching them. Others ‘corpse.’ There are no hard and fast rules.

I became interested in the idea of writing a book about actresses marrying film directors some years ago when I was researching a biography of Jean Simmons. She married Richard Brooks, who directed her in Elmer Gantry.  I imagined I’d find about a dozen or so. Instead, I turned up about 50. Obviously, no publication could accommodate those kinds of numbers so I settled for about two dozen instead. That became doable.

The book has been published by Bear Manor Media. It’s called She Married the Boss. I explain in the introduction that I’m using the term ‘boss’ advisedly.  Men aren’t bosses in marriage today. Neither were they always in the past. Many of the actresses in the book were more famous than the directors they went up the aisle with.

Margaret Sullavan, for instance, was more famous than William Wyler when she married him. Anne Bancroft was better known than Mel Brooks. Judy Garland was more famous than Vincente Minnelli. Madonna’s fame totally eclipsed that of her husband Guy Ritchie.

Some of the marriages I deal with became scandalous. Charlie Chaplin springs to mind. Some of his wives were so young he was accused of paedophilia. A similar charge was laid at Roy Boulting’s door when he married Hayley Mills. Boulting was older than Hayley’s father, John, when they tied the knot.

Different kinds of scandals affected other couples. Ingrid Bergman fell foul of the Vatican when she left her husband to marry Roberto Rossellini. Brigitte Bardot tilted at many windmills when she appeared in the film And God Created Woman in the 1950s.

I don’t come to any conclusions in the book about the advisability of these kinds of liaisons. Some of the marriages worked out. More didn’t. This, sadly, is the way with Hollywood marriages regardless of whether one works with a spouse or not, but I imagine the pressure cooker atmosphere of being with the same person day in day out puts extra pressure on a relationship.

There are exceptions. Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft were very happy together. Paul Newman became closer to Joanne Woodward after he directed her in Rachel, Rachel, for which Woodward was Oscar-nominated.

The most difficult chapter I had to write was the one documenting the marriage between Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate. As you probably know, Tate and the baby she was pregnant with were brutally murdered by Charles Manson’s gang on August 9, 1969.  Many people believed this was the day the 1960s ended rather than December 31.

She Married the Boss can be bought online from Amazon or at www.bearmanormedia.ie.