Susan Hayward's Wonderful LIFE, Part II

What better way to cheer myself up from a personal crisis than to post more of my favorite Susan Hayward LIFE Magazine photos! I'm discovering that the lovely Susan isn't as well represented as many of her fellow 1950s actresses and haven't been able to obtain as many of her movies as I'd like, putting a crimp in the Susan Hayward Craze of 2009. Eventually, I hope to compile a list of her available DVD titles. However, being able to gaze upon her visage again should soften the blow of not having nearly enough of my favorite redhead in the olde collection.

As mentioned in Part I, LIFE has either added more photos from this Edward Clark photo session, or I just missed the "additional" shots the first twenty times around, because I'm constantly discovering new pictures.

Susan Hayward's Wonderful LIFE

One of the many great things that have come out of the LIFE Magazine photo archive is the slew of previously unpublished images. I'm not certain if these Susan Hayward photographs taken on November 11, 1949 fall into the "unreleased" category, but they sure are revelatory. These truly wonderful pictures (the one above is my favorite) find thirty-two year old Susan at the beginning of her run as one of Hollywood's most popular and respected actresses. By the time of this photo shoot, she had already received her first Academy Award nomination for Smash Up: The Story of a Woman (1947) and would earn another in 1949, for My Foolish Heart. So when LIFE photographer Edward Clark went out to the Hayward homestead to shoot these photographs, he was capturing Hayward at her unadorned best: no makeup, freckles in plain view, and looking absolutely beautiful.


In the search for All Things Susan Hayward, I've looked through LIFE's Hayward collection numerous times and I think that new images are continually being added. There are more "Susan Variations" of the actress in her dude-ranch style western wear; white blouse, slacks, and belt buckle, plus "domestic" pics of her doting over her two young sons. It's all so darned charming that the gal from Brooklyn, New York could look so right in those clothes. The overall spirit of the photos is one of a happy young woman just a few years before becoming a major star and Hollywood icon.

More to come...