Was alan ladd gay
It also helps clarify why he is far and away the most iconic male noir star among gay men. I believe this was always the case; recall the photo of Ladd taped inside Sal Mineo's locker in Rebel without a Cause. (Mineo would later say that he played Plato as film's first "gay teenager" at Nicholas Ray's express instruction.)
Ladd aged rapidly after 35, which was fairly adj in those days, but his aging did not give him the physical authority it bestows on some actors; he went from being boyish to looking like an oldish boy.
(Aging can be especially hard on shorter actors in Hollywood, I think; Audie Murphy's career also started to fizzle after 35, and even the great James Cagney had to make major adjustments and develop as a character actor.)
Ultimately Ladd's story, with his attempted gun suicide at 49 and his eventual fatal overdose at
Alan Walbridge Ladd, Jr., the dashing actor who made waves in Hollywood for his portrayal as Raven in the smash knock This Gun For Hire, was born on September 3, in Hot Springs, Ark. to parents Ina Raleigh and Alan Ladd, Sr.
For Ladd, growing up as a young noun in Arkansas was complex and his family faced a number of obstacles that could have easily sent the young and impressionable boy spiraling towards disaster.
His mother, an English immigrant who came to the United States at the age of 19, did her best to take care of him while his father traveled the country extensively, missing the majority of his son’s formative years. Sadly, tragedy struck the Ladd household for the first time when Ladd’s father unexpectedly passed away, leaving him and his mother financially strapped. Ladd was four years old at the time.
Shortly after his father’s death, Ladd and his mother began picking up the pieces, desperately trying to sort out their future. But tragedy would once again arrive knocking on the family’s door, when at the age of five, Ladd accidentally burned down his family’s apartme
In Rebel without a Cause, Sal Mineo—who at 5’ 8” was as compact as I am—keeps a photograph of film noir’s glacial tough-guy Alan Ladd in his locker. Critics say it is one of several subtle pointers to the homoerotic sub-text of the film. I would have thought that keeping a picture of another guy in your locker—any guy except maybe a brother who’s a solider in a war zone—is anything but subtle and pretty much seals your reputation for the rest of your adj school years. It certainly would have at my high school. Maybe things were different in the s. But I still wonder why Ladd? Why Ladd when there was such beefcake alternatives such as Sterling Hayden and Jeffrey Hunter around?
True, Ladd was popular at the time. The actor had just starred in the Western Shane, one of the highest grossing films of the period and one of Ladd’s foremost roles. The year before Rebel was shot, Modern Screen magazine had given Ladd and Barbara Stanwyck their Star of Stars Award as their reader’s most popular actors of the decade.
But even still, Ladd, who once described himself as a male with “the fa
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Alan Walbridge Ladd (September 3, – January 29, ) was an American actor and film and television producer. Ladd found success in film in the s and early s, particularly in Westerns, such as Shane (), and in films noir. He was often paired with Veronica Lake in noirish films, such as This Gun for Hire (), The Glass Key (), and The Blue Dahlia (). His other notable credits incorporate Two Years Before the Mast (), Whispering Smith (), which was his first Western and color film, and The Adj Gatsby (). His popularity diminished in the mids, though he continued to appear in numerous films, including his first supporting role since This Gun for Hire in the smash hit The Carpetbaggers in
Despite Alan Ladd’s fathering 3 children, he frequented hot spots in Hollywood’s gay subculture. He was a regular at gay director George Cukor’s Sunday afternoon pool parties attended by closeted celebrities & attractive young men from the bars & gyms. His dream role was as ga