Hollywood
Mayo continued her career as a dancer, then signed a contract with Samuel Goldwyn and appeared in several of Goldwyn's movies. With Danny Kaye she played the dream-girl heroine in comedies including Wonder Man (1945), The Kid from Brooklyn (1946) and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947).
At the zenith of her career, Mayo was seen as the quintessential voluptuous Hollywood beauty. It was said that she "looked like a pinup painting come to life," and she played just such a role in the 1949 film comedy, The Girl from Jones Beach. According to widely published reports from the late 1940s, the Sultan of Morocco declared her beauty to be proof of the existence of God. In 1949's White Heat she took on the unsympathetic role of the cold and treacherous "Verna Jarrett", opposite James Cagney. She was also cast against type as a shallow golddigger in The Best Years of Our Lives. Her career continued strong through the 50s, frequently in B-movie westerns and adventure films.
By the start of the 60s, the pace of her work slowed, but she continued occasional film appearances in the following decades, her last role being in The Man Next Door (1997). While she also appeared in musicals, Mayo's singing voice was always dubbed.
Mayo and her husband, actor Michael O'Shea co-starred in such stage productions as Tunnel of Love, Fiorello, and George Washington Slept Here. She appeared in her own right as well in stage and musical theater productions.
Mayo has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1751 Vine. In 1996 she received a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.
Read more about this topic: Virginia Mayo
Famous quotes containing the word hollywood:
“Just like those other black holes from outer space, Hollywood is postmodern to this extent: it has no center, only a spreading dead zone of exhaustion, inertia, and brilliant decay.”
—Arthur Kroker (b. 1945)
“That’s one thing I like about Hollywood. The writer is there revealed in his ultimate corruption. He asks no praise, because his praise comes to him in the form of a salary check. In Hollywood the average writer is not young, not honest, not brave, and a bit overdressed. But he is darn good company, which book writers as a rule are not. He is better than what he writes. Most book writers are not as good.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“To say “I accept” in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration-camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas-masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press-censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films and political murder.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)