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| Steven Rea, c. 1943; colourised |
Hollywood hath had its share of tragedy through the decades — lives cut short in various manners, from Carole Lombard to Marilyn Monroe to Sharon Tate, and many more in between and beyond. One of the very saddest tales is that of Susan Peters. One of the most promising young actresses of the early 1940s — first at Warner Bros. and later, more successfully, at MGM — she already had an Academy Award nomination under her belt (for 1942's Random Harvest) when a duck-hunting accident on New Year's Day 1945 left her permanently confined to a wheelchair.
Amazingly, she made a courageous comeback as the wheelchair-bound villainess Leah St. Aubyn in 1948’s The Sign of the Ram (Columbia Pictures), a film that I am fairly certain I have seen at some point in the distant recesses of my memory, and may even have enjoyed, in spite of the fact it did not receive good reviews and was a box office flop. More critically successful was her turn as Laura Wingfield in a production of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, and she also appeared as Elizabeth Barrett Browning in a production of The Barretts of Wimpole Street. In 1951, she starred in a live daily half-hour drama (not an uncommon practice in the early days of television) named Miss Susan for NBC, but this ended after about nine months as her health declined.
By 1952, abandoned by both her former husband and a fiancΓ©, and suffering profoundly from clinical depression and the effects of her paralysis, Susan Peters appeared to lose the will to live (apparently telling a doctor as much) and largely stopped eating and drinking. Compounded by the effects of her paralysis, she developed pneumonia and a chronic kidney infection, which ultimately killed her, only thirty-one years old.
The universe is indifferent, and why such tragedy befalls innocent people and creatures I shall never understand. It certainly damages my faith in God whenever I hear a story such as this one, or witness needless cruelty and suffering in the world. Yet I do pray, and hope not in vain, that Susan Peters ultimately found the peace and happiness that so cruelly eluded her in life.
πͺπ #QueSeraSera π ¨ π
