|
Frances Farmer, known around her home town as the “bad girl of West Seattle” for her spirited, headstrong and magnetic personality,
was the stunningly beautiful actress of stage and screen whose all-too-brief career lit up Hollywood and Broadway in the ’30s and ’40s. Appearing like a comet out of the Pacific Northwest to make her film debut in 1936 in Too Many Parents,during the next six years she appeared in 18 films, three Broadway plays, thirty major radio shows and seven stock company productions – all by the age of 27.
She was soon being compared to Greta Garbo.However, while her professional career was exploding, her personal life was disintegrating. Suffering through one failed marriage to actor Leif Erickson, a string
of failed relationships and pressured by her career, she had already developed an
addiction to amphetamines (benzedrine), taken to help control her weight.In January of 1943, Farmer starred in the film No Escape, an ironic title,
considering the direction that her life would take. According to one account,
“Drinking heavily and relying on amphetamines, which only made her more volatile
and [difficult],” she got into a fight and was arrested. In court the following morning,
she was placed into the custody of psychiatrist Thomas H. Leonard. Leonard, with
whom Farmer refused to cooperate, soon diagnosed her as “suffering from
manic-depressive psychosis – probably the forerunner of a definite dementia
praecox,” a diagnosis “which has since been dismissed as meaningless gibberish.”
The next day she was transferred to the screen actors’ sanitarium in La Crescenta.For the next seven years, Farmer became irreversibly enmeshed in the dark
world of psychiatric treatment and abuse, savaged by a series of violent treatments
intended to strip her of her dignity and talent.Beginning at the sanitarium, she was subjected to insulin shock treatment, “a
brutal psychiatric torture that stuns the body in addition to inflicting extensive brain
damage.” Reacting badly to the insulin shock – she received some 90 of these –
Farmer was no longer able to concentrate or remember lines. She realized that the psychiatrists were “systematically destroying the only thing she had ever been able
to hold onto in life – her faith in her artistic creativity.”
Ein wenig kitschig und außerdem kopiert,aber hm,ausschließliche Statements zu Nirvana gerreichen dieser Frau als Eigentümerin dieses Stichwortes nicht wirklich zu Ehren.
|
