After Mae West and several former silent screen actresses (including Mary Pickford and Pola Negri) all declined the role, Swanson starred in 1950's Sunset Boulevard, portraying Norma Desmond, a faded silent movie star who falls in love with the younger screenwriter Joe Gillis, played by William Holden. Norma Desmond lives in the past, assisted by her butler Max, played by Erich von Stroheim. Her dreams of a comeback are subverted as she becomes delusional. There are cameos from actors of the silent era in the film, including Buster Keaton, H. B. Warner and Anna Q. Nilsson. Cecil B. DeMille plays himself in a pivotal scene.
This has since been called the greatest film about Hollywood. Many of the lines from the film have become pop-culture mainstays, and are often used to describe Swanson herself; among them: "The Greatest Star of them all," "I am big; it's the pictures that got small," "We didn't need dialogue, we had faces," and "All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up." She received her third Best Actress Oscar nomination, but lost to Judy Holliday for Born Yesterday.
In 1950 Swanson traveled to the British premier of the film Sunset Boulevard in Blackpool by train with an appointed 'ambassadress of British film' the 18-year-old Rank star Petula Clark. Decades later Clark would play Norma Desmond on more occasions than any other actress in the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical based on the film.
She received several subsequent acting offers but turned most of them down, saying they tended to be pale imitations of Norma Desmond. Her last major Hollywood motion picture role was the poorly received Three for Bedroom "C" in 1952. In 1956, Swanson made Nero's Mistress, which also starred Vittorio de Sica and Brigitte Bardot. Her final screen appearance was as herself in Airport 1975.
Though Swanson only made three films after Sunset Boulevard, she starred in numerous stage and television productions during her remaining years. She was active in various business ventures, traveled extensively, wrote articles, columns, and an autobiography, painted and sculpted, and became a passionate advocate of various health and nutrition topics. In 1966 The George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, honored Swanson with a career film retrospective titled "A Tribute to Gloria Swanson" that screened some of her films over a few days.
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