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| Birth Name(s) : Frances Elena Farmer |
Date of Birth: September 19, 1913 |
| Status:
Married
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Partner:
Leland Mikesell |
| Profession:
Actor |
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Full Frances Farmer Biography
| Born in Seattle, Frances Farmer studied drama at the University of Washington, Seattle. In 1936, she went to Hollywood where she secured a seven-year contract with Paramount. In 1942, she was wrongfully declared 'mentally incompetent' and committed to a series of asylums and public mental hospitals, where eventually she received a lobotomy. After eleven years she was released, and spent some of the remaining years of her life tending the parents who had committed her and taking odd jobs. She appeared on "This Is Your Life" (1952), and ran her own TV show, "Frances Farmer Presents" (1958) for six years. She died of cancer in 1970. |
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Additional Frances Farmer Biography
Frances Elena Farmer (September 19, 1913 – August 1, 1970) was an American film and theater actress. She is perhaps better known for the sensationalized events surrounding her six-year involuntary commitment to a mental hospital, which later became the subject of three films, three books, numerous magazine articles, and even a song.
Farmer was born in Seattle, Washington, to Ernest Melvin Farmer and Lillian Van Ornum Farmer. In 1931, while attending West Seattle High School, she entered and won $100 in a writing contest sponsored by Scholastic Magazine with her controversial essay God Dies, a precocious attempt to reconcile her wish for, in her words, a "superfather" God with her observations of a chaotic, seemingly Godless, world. In 1935, as a student at the University of Washington, she won a subscription contest for the leftist newspaper The Voice of Action. First prize was a trip to the Soviet Union, which she took in order to get a first-hand look at the pioneering Moscow Art Theater, despite her mother's strong objections. These two incidents fostered accusations that Farmer was both an atheist and a Communist.
Farmer was not entirely satisfied with her career, however. She felt stifled by Paramount's tendency to cast her in films which depended on her looks more than her talent and her naturally outspoken demeanor made her seem uncooperative and contemptuous. In an age when the studios dictated every facet of a star's life, Farmer rebelled against the studio's control and resisted every attempt they made to glamourize her private life, refusing to attend Hollywood parties or to date other stars for the gossip columns. At the time, she was sympathetically described as being indifferent about the clothing she wore and was said to drive an older-model "green roadster," which, according to a columnist, once broke down on Melrose Avenue, blocking traffic as Farmer pushed the stricken car to the side.
Within days, having been sent to the San Fernando Valley and the Kimball Sanitarium in La Crescenta, Farmer was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and received insulin shock therapy, a treatment accepted as standard psychiatric procedure at the time (although later discredited). The side effects included intense nausea. Her family later claimed the treatment was given without their consent (as documented in her sister's self-published book Look Back in Love and in court records). The sanitarium was a minimum security facility and after about nine months, Farmer walked away one afternoon. She appeared at her half-sister Rita's house over 20 miles away, and the pair called their mother in Seattle to complain about the insulin treatment. Lillian Farmer traveled to California and began a lengthy legal battle to have guardianship of her daughter transferred from the state of California to her. Although several psychiatrists testified that Farmer needed further treatment, her mother prevailed, and the two of them left Los Angeles by train on September 13, 1943.
In the fictional biography Shadowland (1978), published eight years after Farmer's death, William Arnold was the first to claim she had been subjected to a transorbital lobotomy performed by Dr. Walter Freeman. This assertion was repeated in Lobotomy, Resort to the Knife (1982) by David Shutts, who cited Frank Freeman (Walter Freeman's eldest son) as saying his father performed a lobotomy on Farmer. As evidence, he offered a dramatic photograph of a lobotomy procedure. This was later shown to be from a series of images accompanying a July 1949 Post-Intelligencer article about Walter Freeman. The same patient's face is completely visible in other photos and she is clearly not Farmer (a link below to Shedding Light on Shadowland includes the photos).
Also, Arnold acknowledges having received help from the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (an anti-psychiatric group created by the Church of Scientology) and Scientology president Heber Jentzsch.
In 1954, after a brief second marriage to utility worker Alfred H. Lobley, Farmer moved to Eureka, California, where she worked anonymously for almost three years in a photo studio as a secretary/bookkeeper.
In 1957, she met Leland C. Mikesell, an independent broadcast promoter from Indianapolis who helped her move to San Francisco and get work as a receptionist in a hotel, where he then arranged for a reporter to recognize her and write an article. This led to renewed interest. She told Modern Screen magazine, "I blame nobody for my fall... I think I have won the fight to control myself." She made two appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show and also appeared on the This Is Your Life, during which she was asked about her alcoholism and mental illness. Farmer said she had never believed she was mentally ill and remarked, "if a person is treated like a patient, they are apt to act like one."
Her last acting role was in The Visit at Loeb Playhouse on the Purdue University campus in West Lafayette, Indiana, which ran from October 22 to October 30, 1965. During this engagement, she was arrested for drunk driving.
"It was pretty sad, because for the first time I found how stupid people could be. It sort of made me feel alone in the world. 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." |
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Frances Farmer Quote(s)
| Never console yourself into believing that the terror has passed, for it looms as large and evil today as it did in the despicable era of Bedlam. But I must relate the horrors as I recall them, in the hope that some force for mankind might be moved to relieve forever the unfortunate creatures who are still imprisoned in the back wards of decaying institutions. -- on her past experience as a mental patient |
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