Who was Clara Bow? The first song title that caught my attention on Taylor Swift’s new record The Tortured Poets Department wasn’t “But Daddy, I Love Him” or even “Fresh Out the Slammer.”
The name Clara Bow is something we all have thought about a lot over the last few years. Check out more details about the personality through this article.
Who was Clara Bow?
Bow was born in Brooklyn in 1905. Bow had a hard childhood, including a mother who supposedly had mental health problems and was later locked up. When she was in her late teens, she decided to become a movie star.
She joined a magazine’s beauty contest when she was 16 years old, and it led to her getting a small part in the 1922 movie Beyond the Rainbow.
It was said that some of her scenes were cut, but she later had big hits in the 1920s with parts in Mantrap (1926), It (1927), and Wings (1927).
How did Clara Bow influence Taylor Swift’s latest album, The Tortured Poets Department?
The new song on The Tortured Poets Department tells a story similar to Swift’s song “The Lucky One” from Red. In both songs, she sings about a previous starlet who was looked at closely in public.
Swift says, “You look like Clara Bow / In this light, remarkable / All your life, did you know / You’d be picked like a rose?” in the first line. She thinks about how exciting it must be to be discovered and how she might “die” if that came true.
After mentioning Stevie Nicks in 1975 and how the crowd went “wild at her fingertips,” she says again that she might “die” if she ever “made it” big in Los Angeles. In The Bridge, though, Swift says that success and fame aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.
“Beauty is a beast that roars down on all fours, demanding more,” she sings. “Only when your girlish glow flickers just so do they let you know? / Being happy is like hell on earth. But those breaks don’t come easy.
Clara Bow’s Childhood and School Years
Clara Bow was born on January 29, 1904, in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. She was the youngest and only child of Robert and Sarah Gordon Bow who lived to adulthood.
Bow was born into a poor family and had a bad childhood.
Her father was a ne’er-do-well, and her maternal grandma got mentally ill and had to be locked up. Bow and her family often moved from one Brooklyn home to another. She had lived in more than a dozen cold-water flats.
Bow loved movies and read a lot of movie magazines, like Photoplay, Shadowland, and Motion Picture Classic, even though she had a hard childhood. Her father gave her two dollars in 1921 so she could get some cheap pictures taken of herself and join a beauty contest in Motion Picture magazine.
She competed against 20 other women and got first place. The prize included a trophy, a picture of her in the January 1922 issue, and a chance to meet casting directors in New York.
She got a small part in a Billy Dove movie called Beyond the Rainbow because of this. Bow’s life is both inspiring and sad because she went from growing up poor to becoming a famous actress in Hollywood, but she also had to deal with a lot of problems and difficulties along the way.
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Highlights of Clara Bow’s Career
There was an American actress named Clara Bow who became famous in silent movies in the 1920s and made the switch to “talkies” in 1929. They called her “The It Girl” because of her role as a brave shopgirl in the movie It. Bow became a sign of the Roaring Twenties and is thought to have been its most important sex symbol.
In 46 silent movies and 11 talkies, she was in hits like Mantrap (1926), It (1927), and Wings (1927). Bow was the number one movie at the box office in 1928 and 1929, and the number two movie at the box office in 1927 and 1930. It was said that her role in a movie gave buyers a “safe return” with odds of almost two to one.
At the height of her fame, in January 1929, she got more than 45,000 love letters in a single month. Bow stopped acting in 1932, two years after getting married to actor Rex Bell.
He then became a rancher in Nevada. Hoop-La, her last movie, came out in 1933. Bow had a heart attack and died in 1965 when he was 60 years old.
What ended Clara Bow’s career?
Clara Bow’s career came to an end when she quit working in movies in the early 1930s. Even though Bow was successful as an actor in silent films, she had a hard time making the switch to talkies.
The microphone and remembering lines gave her a lot of anxiety. She left Paramount Studios in 1931 and lived a quiet life away from the spotlight. But she came back in 1932 with the movie Call Her Savage, which gave her the dramatic part she had been waiting for.
Bow quit acting for good after making another movie for FOX called Hoopla. She said she didn’t want to be known as someone who could only take off her clothes and wanted to do something real.
Bow’s career was marked by her rise to fame in silent movies, her problems with the change to talkies, and her retirement from the movie business in the end.
Clara Bow’s Family
Clara Bow was born in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, in 1905. She is the youngest and only child of Robert and Sarah Gordon Bow who is still alive. Sarah, her mother, had two older sisters who died when they were very young. A doctor told her not to get pregnant again because there was a chance that another baby would die.
Even though she was warned, Sarah got pregnant with Clara in late 1904. Both Clara and her mother lived through the dangerous pregnancy and the heat wave. The US Censuses of 1910 and 1920 list Clara’s birth year as 1905, but her gravestone lists it as 1907.
“Bleak, sparsely furnished room above [a] dilapidated Baptist Church” is where Clara was born. Robert, her father, was a bad guy, and Sarah Hatton Gordon, her maternal grandma, went crazy and was locked up in a hospital in 1906.
Clara Bow Spouse & Kids
Clara Bow was married to actor Rex Bell, and the two of them had two boys. Their boys’ names were Tony and George. Clara Bow and Rex Bell were married for more than 30 years. After Bow retired from acting in 1933, she spent a lot of time with her family.
Moving to a ranch in Searchlight, Nevada, with Bow and Bell changed their family life. That’s where they raised their two kids, Tony, born in 1934, and George, born in 1938. Bow had problems in her personal life, but her marriage to Rex Bell and their life as a family in Nevada gave her security and happiness away from the attention of Hollywood.
Death of Clara Bow
Clara Bow had a heart attack and died in Culver City, California, on September 27, 1965. She was 60 years old.
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