Frances

Plots: The story of Frances Farmer’s meteoric rise to fame in Hollywood and the tragic turn her life took when she was blacklisted. Frances Farmer, a precocious Seattle teenager, takes unpopular social and political positions, to the mixed reactions of her parents. Frances becomes an actress and has some strong success in New York City, but her refusal to bend her convictions and her outspoken (but sometimes naive) political expressiveness cause her difficulties, especially after she accepts a Hollywood contract. Torn between new-found success and intense feelings that she does not deserve the riches and fame she gains from the phoniness of Hollywood, Frances butts heads with studio executives and with her own mother, who revels in Frances’s fame but provides Frances no emotional support. When drunken fights and arrests derail her career, Frances is sent to a psychiatric hospital with the acquiescence of her mother. What follows is a nightmare of poor treatment and psychological trauma, augmented by the increasing determination of Frances’s mother to control her daughter’s life. A semi-fictional account of the adult life of Frances Farmer is presented, that account focusing on the rise and fall of her acting career in the 1930s and early 1940s. Growing up in Seattle the only offspring of milquetoast lawyer and his wife Ernest and Lillian Farmer, Frances became, much like her mother, outspoken and strong willed, often speaking out against strongly held societal beliefs of the day (i.e. the Christian right) concerning religion and politics, and publicly calling out hypocrisy. Her want to escape provincial Seattle life and to become an actress were equally strong, which led to a meteoric rise to a studio contract and featured roles in Hollywood movies. She quickly came to the realization that Hollywood and she were a mismatch in the studio’s control of her life and her career, including of her personal life, and they largely treating her as just another pretty Hollywood starlet rather than a thinking person with strong views. As much as she tried to escape Hollywood to more aligned acting opportunities such as Harold Clurman and Clifford Odets’ theater group in New York City, she was sucked back in time and time again in the control wielded in part by stereotypical stage mother Lillian, her wants for Frances, and thus herself, despite the studio striking out against Frances in her outspokenness against them, they considering themselves the engine that made her a name. The stronger Frances rebelled, the stronger the other sides fought back which led to her multiple institutionalizations regardless if she truly had clinical mental health issues. Her many romantic relationships over this time are also shown, the one constant through it all being her friendship and romance with leftist writer, Harry York, she his true love.