Lizabeth Scott

Lizabeth Scott

Lizabeth Virginia Scott was an iconic American actress known for her extensive work in the film Noir Genre. She was born as Emma Matzo on September 29th, 1922, but later changed her name to Elizabeth Scott and began to pursue a career in acting. She was first cast as the lead in a run of The Skin of Our Teeth in 1943, and dropped the "E" from her name before she debuted. After several screen tests with different production companies, she trained with Fritz Lang and was discovered by Hal Wallis, who cast her in You Came Along (1945) at the age of 22. This marked the beginning of a long working relationship that bordered on obsession on Wallis’s part. She was then forced into a lead by Wallis alongside Barbara Stanwyck in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), who objected to being cast alongside a non-star. Wallis' obsession got her a job that would have otherwise been taken from her, and this opened up several doors for the young actress.

Her performance in that film got her enough attention to be cast in Dead Reckoning (1947) as a genuine lead star at the age of 24. She gained the most publicity she had ever received, but unfortunately she was typecast for the duration of her career. This typecast was solidified in her next two films, Desert Fury (1947) and I Walk Alone (1948), both film noirs, with the latter being another Wallis film.Throughout the 50s, Scott was very interested in philosophy and religion, interacting with such figures as author Ayn Rand and the Dalai Lama, and this heavily influenced her role choice. At first, she continued to star in film noirs as her classic femme fatale role in films like Dark City (1950) and Stolen Face (1952), but then she attempted to evade her typecast in films like The Company She Keeps (1951) with her self-sacrificing probation officer role and Red Mountain (1951), a western. She also starred in several romances with dominant feminine leads like Bad for Each Other (1953) and Two of a Kind (1951), and continued to star in films until the 1970s.

Scott was known for her cool, naturalistic underplay as an actress, often delivering a frozen face with a fierce presence. However, this was often critiqued as a “wooden” style of acting, but some of this criticism can be accredited to the initial apprehension of the emerging film noir genre. In the mid 1950s, an expose attempt by the magazine, The Confidential, was made against her claiming that she was a lesbian. Instead of paying the magazine the settlement amount to not publish the article, she sued the publication for $2.5 million, along with over 200 other insulted actors in The People of the State of California v. Robert Harrison, et al. In the wake of the trial, Scott’s film career was ruined and she was forgotten by the media. Other than appearing in theatre and film occasionally throughout the next two decades, she remained relatively hidden from the public eye until her death on January 31st, 2015 at the age of 92.