Frances farmer biography transorbital lobotomy effects

Seattle-born actress Frances Farmer, a rising star in the s, is remembered today more for her unfortunate life story than for her once promising career. Talented and beautiful, Farmer was also willful, troubled, and self-destructive. After a period of increasingly erratic behavior, she was declared legally insane and institutionalized in Released in , she spent the rest of her life in relative obscurity. Since her death in , however, she has become something of a cult figure, the subject of three books, three movies (the best known of which is the film Frances, starring Jessica Lange), several off-Broadway plays, scores of magazine articles, and a song, "Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle" by Kurt Cobain, which includes this line: "She'll come back as fire, to burn all the liars, and leave a blanket of ash on the ground."

The standard version of the Frances Farmer story goes like this: An idealistic young actress challenges the hypocrisy of her world and becomes the

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&#;The more people pointed at me in scorn, the more stubborn I got. And when they began calling me the &#;Bad Girl of West Seattle High,&#; I tried to live up to it.&#; -Frances Farmer

When I relayed the complicated tale of Frances Farmer&#;s life to a friend of mine, his response was, &#;Now, that would make an interesting movie.&#; I immediately pointed him to the film, Frances, starring Jessica Lange. While I possess a deep love for biopics, each must be taken with a grain of salt&#;they are, after all, crafted to sell to a crowd, and to some degree become part of the ever-growing Hollywood patchwork of fact and fiction.

Frances Farmer has fascinated me as a powerful force off-screen, while also presenting a striking balance between assertiveness and subtlety in her films. It is easy to say that she lead a controversial life, but I am more inclined to say that the true controversy lies in how her story has been told over the years. The truth is that there are several piv

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Frances Farmer

American actress (–)

For the law librarian, see Frances Farmer (librarian).

Frances Elena Farmer (September 19, &#;&#; August 1, ) was an American actress. She appeared in over a dozen feature films over the course of her career, though she garnered notoriety for sensationalized accounts of her life, especially her involuntary commitment to psychiatric hospitals and subsequent mental health struggles.

A native of Seattle, Washington, Farmer began acting in stage productions while a student at the University of Washington. After graduating, she began performing in stock theater before signing a rulle contract with Paramount Pictures on her 22nd birthday in September She made her spelfilm debut in the B filmToo Many Parents (), followed bygd another B picture, Border Flight, before being given the lead role opposite Bing okänt in the musical Western Rhythm on the Range (). Unhappy with the opportunities the studio gave her, Farmer returned to stock theater