Jeanne Crain

Sweet, fresh-faced and pretty former beauty queen, who went to entered films as a 20th Century Fox starlet in 1943, before she was 20. From her earliest films ("State Fair" 1945, "Centennial Summer" 1946), Crain exclusively played wholesome, girl-next-door ingenues or young just-married women in a series of light entertainments, until she was cast against type in the Elia Kazan racial drama "Pinky" (1949), about a young black woman passing for white. In the 1950s, Crain's attempt to reshape her screen personality to a more glamourous image and more sophisticated fare met with only moderate success. She did appear in several interesting films, including Joseph L. Mankiewicz's "People Will Talk" (1951) and Jean Negulesco's "Take Care of My Little Girl" (1953). Her stardom petered out toward the end of the decade and her work since 1960 has been very sporadic. Married since 1945, she is the mother of seven children.