Lana Turner: The volatile, legendary story of Hollywood’s first modern celebrity film star

Once known as the Sweater Girl thanks to a particularly tight jumper in her first role, Lana Turner went on to become an Oscar-winning star. Geoffrey Macnab chronicles the tumultuous career of Hollywood’s original blonde bombshell – and the equally turbulent personal life that threatened to eclipse it

Lana Turner became known as the Sweater Girl following her apperance in 1937’s ‘They Won’t Forget’ (Getty)

“Would you like to be in the movies?” a stranger asks the 15-year-old girl sipping a Coke in a cafe near her Hollywood school. “I don’t know. I’d have to ask my mother,” she ingenuously replies.

This, Lana Turner later recalled, was how her career began.

Turner (1921-1995) has a fair claim as the first modern celebrity film star, and her private life was every bit as turbulent and colourful as the plot lines in her most outrageous on-screen melodramas. Long before the tabloid frenzy surrounding Angelina Jolie and Lindsay Lohan, Turner was obsessed over by gossip columnists as much as she was by film critics, who often sneered at her.