Frances Farmer

Frances Elena Farmer (September 19, 1913 – August 1, 1970) was an American actress. She appeared in over a dozen feature films and three significant Broadway plays over the course of her career. Farmer gained greater notoriety posthumously for having had a nervous breakdown and undergone a five-year involuntary commitment in a state-run mental institution. She was said to have suffered abusive conditions, which have remained the subject of much controversy and speculation.

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 film contract with Paramount Pictures on her 22nd birthday in September 1935.

She made her film debut in the B film Too Many Parents (1936), followed by another B picture, Border Flight, before being given the lead role opposite Bing Crosby in the musical Western Rhythm on the Range (1936). Unhappy with the opportunities the studio gave her, Farmer returned to stock theater in 1937 before being cast in the original Broadway production of Clifford Odets's Golden Boy, staged by New York City's Group Theatre. She followed this with two Broadway productions directed by Elia Kazan in 1939, but a battle with depression and binge drinking caused her to drop out of a subsequent Ernest Hemingway stage adaptation.

Farmer returned to Los Angeles, earning supporting roles in the comedy World Premiere and the film noir Among the Living (both 1941). In 1942, publicity of her reportedly erratic behavior began to surface and, after several arrests and committals to psychiatric institutions, Farmer was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

At the request of her family, particularly her mother, she was committed to an institution in her home state of Washington, where she remained a patient until 1950. Farmer attempted an acting comeback, mainly appearing as a television host in Indianapolis on her own series, Frances Farmer Presents. Her final film role was in the 1958 drama The Party Crashers. She spent the majority of the 1960s occasionally performing in local theater productions staged by Purdue University. In the spring of 1970, she was diagnosed with esophageal cancer, from which she died on August 1, 1970, aged 56.

In the decade after her death Farmer was the subject of two high-profile books focusing on the years that she was institutionalized: Will There Really Be a Morning? (1972) was an autobiography partially ghostwritten by a friend. In it she claimed to have been subjected to consistent and harrowing physical abuse. Subsequently, Seattle journalist William Arnold investigated the book's claims for his own novel, Shadowland (1978), in which the author pieced together a larger story behind her commitment and alleged mistreatment.

These books offered drastically different visions of Farmer, and elements of each would be disputed, but they created an intense posthumous interest in her life. Over the subsequent four decades, this interest resulted in three feature films, eight stage plays, and numerous popular songs about Farmer. As in Kurt Cobain's 1993 rock anthem, "Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle", she was frequently celebrated as a psychiatric martyr and a defiant feminist rebel.