Norma Shearer

Edith Norma Shearer grew up in Montreal, in a household made comfortable by her father's construction business and unhappy by her parents' marriage; she announced at nine, after a vaudeville show, that she would be an actress, and she was clear-eyed about what she saw in the mirror — a figure she thought dumpy, small eyes, a cast in the left one — and ferociously ambitious in spite of it. She acted in films from 1919 to 1942, often as spirited, independent women, appeared in adaptations of Noël Coward, Eugene O'Neill and Shakespeare, was the first performer nominated five times for an acting Academy Award — six in all — and won for The Divorcee in 1930.

The critic Mick LaSalle called her a feminist pioneer, the first American film actress to make it acceptable on screen to be single and not a virgin. By 1927 she had made thirteen silent films for MGM, each of them profitable, and in September of that year she married the studio's head of production, Irving Thalberg, having converted to Judaism before the wedding; they had two children.