Evelyn Keyes: Life and Legacy of 'Gone with the Wind' Actress (1916–2008)

Evelyn Louise Keyes, film and television actress best-known for her portrayal of Suellen O’Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939), was born in Port Arthur, Texas, on November 20, 1916, to Omar Dowe Keyes and Maude Olive (Garrett) Keyes.

When Keyes was two years old, her father died and she and her remaining family moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where her maternal grandmother lived. Keyes grew up in poverty. Her mother worked a variety of jobs to make ends meet, and her older sisters were forced to work as soon as they graduated high school to help support the family. According to Keyes, as a teenager she resolved to escape poverty by becoming an actress. Already active in a girls musical club, she also took dance lessons and danced for the Daughters of the Confederacy, the American Legion, and other local clubs. Keyes graduated from Atlanta’s Girls’ High School in 1934 and subsequently left home for Hollywood. She lived at the famed Hollywood Studio Club, which offered young women with film industry aspirations room and board for, as Keyes recalled, about ten dollars a week.

In 1937 Keyes signed a seven-year contract with director Cecil B. DeMille. Her starting salary was fifty dollars a week and DeMille had the option to drop her at any time. Keyes claimed that DeMille insisted that she lose her southern accent. She debuted in the director's swashbuckler film The Buccaneer (1938) and also appeared in DeMille's following film, the Western Union Pacific (1939). During her acting lessons, Keyes began a short-lived affair with actor Anthony Quinn. She was cast in minor roles in several B movies for Paramount Pictures. Keyes was cast in what would have been her first major role as Julie in Say It in French (1938). However, she was forced to drop out of the film to recover from an abortion that Keyes said left her unable to have children. The pregnancy resulted from then-boyfriend, Barton Bainbridge, whom she later married. Shortly thereafter Keyes auditioned for the lead role of Scarlett O’Hara in David Selznick’s Gone with the Wind. She was instead cast as Scarlett’s younger sister, Suellen. This became the role for which Keyes is known best.

In 1940 Keyes signed a contract with Columbia Pictures. Her first film with Columbia was The Lady in Question (1940), starring Rita Hayworth and directed by Charles Vidor, with whom Keyes began an affair. In summer 1940 she separated from Bainbridge, who killed himself shortly thereafter. Keyes subsequently married Vidor on March 18, 1944, and divorced him in May the following year. She received leading roles in several Columbia movies, including such colorful roles as the daughter of Boris Karloff's mad scientist character in Before I Hang (1940), the blind woman loved by Peter Lorre’s disfigured gangster character in The Face Behind the Mask (1941), and Babs the Genie in the satirical A Thousand and One Nights (1945). She starred in several films opposite Glenn Ford. Her most notable role during this period was in the romantic comedy Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) as the love-interest of Robert Montgomery, who played a boxer that reincarnates into the body of a corrupt businessman. Other major successes were The Jolson Story (1946), a fictionalized account of singer Al Jolson’s life in which Keyes played Jolson's wife, and Mrs. Mike (1949), a film about the hardships faced by the wife of a Canadian Mountie. She made the later film on loan to United Artists. Keyes expressed dissatisfaction with many of the roles she received during her time at Columbia. She found herself in the shadow of star Rita Hayworth and feuding with Columbia president Harry Cohn. On July 23, 1946, Evelyn Keyes married John Huston, best-known for directing The Maltese Falcon (1941); their tumultuous marriage ended in divorce in February 1950.

After leaving Columbia, Keyes starred in the film noir The Prowler (1951), written by blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, which she considered to be her finest film. Keyes became noted in later years for her roles in films noir. She had previously starred in Johnny O’Clock (1947), alongside Mrs. Mike co-star Dick Powell, and The Killer That Stalked New York (1950), her last film with Columbia, and went on to star in 99 River Street (1953). During production of this latter film, she began a relationship with producer Mike Todd. The two became engaged but never married. During the production of Todd’s Around the World in 80 Days (1956), in which Keyes had a cameo role, Todd left her for actress Elizabeth Taylor. Except for a brief return to film for Larry Cohen’s A Return to Salem’s Lot (1987) and Wicked Stepmother (1989), Keyes’s last major role was in Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch (1955), starring Marilyn Monroe. She continued to act sporadically on stage and television. In 1957 she married bandleader Artie Shaw in Spain, where they lived together for some time. The two later separated and ultimately divorced in 1985.

Keyes wrote an autobiographical novel, I Am a Billboard (1971), and two memoirs, Scarlett O’Hara’s Younger Sister (1977) and I’ll Think about That Tomorrow (1991). She also wrote the Los Angeles Times column “Keyes to the Town” in the mid-1980s. In her writings about her life in the Golden Age of Hollywood, Keyes was open about the widespread sexism and sexual harassment and abuse faced by women. In particular, she wrote about dealing with the unwanted advances she received from Columbia head Harry Cohn, her refusal of his overtures, and the resulting retaliation she suffered that soured her career at Columbia. Politically, Keyes was a self-described "flaming liberal" who had once been a “mush-minded bigot."

Evelyn Keyes died at the age of ninety-one of uterine cancer on July 4, 2008, at the Peppers Estate, an assisted living facility in Montecito, California. She was cremated. Some of her ashes were placed in a lantern on display at the Museum of the Gulf Coast and the rest buried in a family plot at the Waco Baptist Church Cemetery in Waco, Georgia. Her tombstone bears the epitaph “Gone with the wind.”