Anton BRUEHL
Australia 1900 – United States of America 1982
United States from 1919

not titled [Gene Tierney] (c.1938)
dye-transfer colour photograph
image 38.9 (h) x 30.8 (w) cm
Gift of American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia, Inc., New York, NY, USA, made possible with the generous support of Anton Bruehl Jr, 2006.
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
NGA 2006.119

Regarded as one of the great beauties of her day, Gene Tierney (1920–1991) played her most famous part in 1944 in the film noir classic, Laura, directed by Otto Preminger. The following year she earned an Academy Award nomination for her portrayal of a dangerously jealous woman in Leave her to Heaven, Twentieth Century Fox’s most successful film of the 1940s. She also starred in Ernst Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait (1943), The Razor’s Edge (1946) and The Ghost and Mrs Muir (1947). Bruehl emphasises the femme fatale side of Tierney’s persona, a logical choice given her roles at the time – depicting her as sophisticated and glamorous, towering over her male admirer.