She was billed by MGM as the "The First Lady of the Screen," and the publicists were not far wrong: Norma Shearer was the queen of the Metro lot, and Metro was the number-one studio. The actress compensated for a relative lack of talent through the force of her personality; she had an unmistakable screen presence and admirable poise, both of which helped her to accumulate six ACADEMY AWARD nominations and one Oscar as Best Actress.
Attractive, though not a beauty, Norma Shearer nonetheless cut a striking figure through a canny understanding of film lighting and how it affected her appearance. Not least among her assets was her marriage to MGM's head of production, IRVING THALBERG, who personally guided her career. With Thalberg's help in choosing her vehicles, she was among the most popular actresses of her day, at or near the top of most popularity polls during the first half of the 1930s.
Born Edith Norma Shearer in Montreal, she studied the piano as a child. She broke into the movies in front of the screen, tinkling the ivories in a nickelodeon. In desperate need of money after her father went broke, her mother trundled Norma Shearer and her sister to New York. Mrs. Shearer was hoping she could get her two daughters into the movies. Norma edged into her film career as an extra in The Flapper (1920), quickly working her way up to a featured role in The Stealers (1920). She worked steadily thereafter in mostly unimportant movies, moving to Metro Pictures right before it became Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. She ended up staying with MGM for the rest of her film career.
Norma Shearer had her breakthrough in 1924 when she starred in He Who Gets Slapped. During the next several years, she played a large number of sophisticated ladies; becoming a favorite of female movie fans, who copied her clothing and hairstyles. She was not, however, MGM's biggest star in the last years of the silent era - Garbo had that distinction. That soon began to change after Norma Shearer married Thalberg in 1927.
Thalberg, known as the boy wonder for his ability to spot talent and produce quality hit productions, picked Norma Shearer's scripts with his vaunted commercial and critical sense. She catapulted to the top of the MGM heap in such silent films as Lubitsch's The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (1927) and The Latest from Paris (1928) and then in sound films, including The Trial of Mary Dugan (1929) and The Divorcee (1930), which brought her a Best Actress Academy Award. Oscarnominated performances in Their Own Desire (1929) and A Free Soul (1931) soon followed, by which time Norma Shearer was among the highest paid actors in Hollywood, earning a reported $6,000 a week.
Norma Shearer then entered her highbrow period with rich roles in such sophisticated fare as Private Lives (1931), Strange Interlude (1932), The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), and Romeo and Juliet (1936), the last two of which garnered her Best Actress nominations. Then the ailing Thalberg died in 1936. Norma Shearer was cut adrift in more ways than one - besides losing her husband, she also lost her mentor and her protector.
Thalberg had laid the groundwork for her starring role in Marie Antoinette (1938), which brought Norma Shearer her final Best Actress Oscar nomination, but without the late mogul's unfailing intuitive knack for picking scripts, she soon began to appear in poor vehicles. At first, she did well in choosing Idiot's Delight (1939) and The Women (1939), but she stumbled badly when she turned down leading roles in Gone With the Wind (1939) and Mrs. Miniver (1942). Her later films such as Escape (1940) and We Were Dancing (1942) were disasters.
When what became her final film, Her Cardboard Lover (1942), bombed at the box office, Norma Shearer decided to retire. As a stockholder in MGM, though, she still wielded power and influence at the studio. For instance, she was instrumental in establishing Janet Leigh's career. Norma Shearer remarried after leaving MGM, taking a former skiing instructor as her husband. In her later years, she became blind and lived at the Motion Picture and Television Lodge in Woodland Hills, California. There is a building named for her at MGM, the last legacy of the First Lady of the Screen.
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