We know, they can't help it at CRAPAPEDIA but they lie and then they lie again.
This is from their post on actress Ann Harding:
Harding's performances were often heralded by the critics, who cited her diction and stage experience as assets to the then-new medium of "talking pictures." Harding's second film was Her Private Affair, in which she portrayed a wife of questionable morality. The film was an enormous commercial success. During this period, she was generally considered to be one of cinema's most beautiful actresses, with her waist-length blonde hair being one of her most noted physical attributes. Films during her peak include The Animal Kingdom, Peter Ibbetson, When Ladies Meet, The Flame Within, and Biography of a Bachelor Girl. Harding, however, eventually became stereotyped as the innocent, self-sacrificing young woman. Following lukewarm responses by both critics and the public to several of her later 1930s films, she eventually stopped making movies after she married the conductor Werner Janssen in 1937.
Oh, is that what destroyed her film career? She got typecast and that destroyed her film career?
Maybe in The World of CRAPAPAEDIA. But in the real world?
In the real world, she was making many movies. She was making four Hollywood films a year in 1934 and 1935, for example.
1936 so the slow down. What happened?
Well she did make LOVE FROM A STRANGER but the career was over -- not just over when it was released in January 1937 and flopped but also when she made it. It wasn't a Hollywood film. It was the nail in her coffin.
She denied her ex-husband visitation of their daughter. She did this in 1934 and it got worse and worse and people began to seriously dislike her. That's why she couldn't get any films role in Hollywood by 1936. The two films that bombed that year had been filmed in 1935 and that was it. That's why she took the role in LOVE FROM A STRANGER -- a British production. No one else would have her.
If she hoped the controversy (and public hatred) would blow over when she returned after filming, she probably shouldn't have taken her daughter out of the country to England with her.
June 2, 1936, AP's story ran with the headline "Prosecution waits for Ann in England" and the article informed that when Ann arrived in England, she might be arrested for kidnapping because her ex-husband had "[a]n abduction warrant" regarding Ann taking their 7-year-old daughter with her.
Now we can talk about the way women are judged more harshly and we can discuss the way the courts favored men back then but that's really not the point. The point is that the press had already portrayed the divorce as 'strange.' Ann continued to work because it was good copy, she and her husband divorced to help him. Honest. Then came the custody battles, the court appearances, the various states. But when 'strange' morphed into a custody battle, the public was not on her side and her Hollywood career had ended. She thought England could revive her fortunes and maybe it could have if she hadn't taken her daughter with her. Who knows?
But the public turned on her because of the custody battle. And she didn't make the 'decision' to stop making films. She was already done as a star in US films, but after the film she made in England flopped, the international market wasn't interested in her either. She would try to return in the 40s but her days of being the star of an A-list picture had ended.
