Leaving The Studio System
The Hollywood studio system dominated American feature film production in the first half of the 20th century. Under it, an actor would sign an exclusive contract to make films for a major studio, such as Fox. The system that worked well at first for Paget as her early Fox films did well, so the studio bolstered her film career. During the year after Princess of the Nile was released, the fan mail Paget received at 20th Century-Fox was topped only by that for Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable.
During this time that she appeared in what would become her signature role — Lilia the water girl, in Cecil B. DeMille's monumental production of The Ten Commandments - Fox lent her to Paramount. In 1955 she also broke the exclusivity clause of her contract; White Feather (1955) was not a Fox film. The studio dropped her contract and The River's Edge (1957) was the last film she made for Fox.
After that, her career began to decline. She was typically cast in exotic roles such as South Sea Island maidens or middle-eastern harem girls. She traveled to Germany in 1959 to join the cast of Fritz Lang's two-film adventure saga (called in America Journey to the Lost City) in a role that recalled her Shalimar/Taura of Princess of the Nile. Like the Egyptian epic, "Lost City" is remembered chiefly for her energetic dance scenes. In 1960 she starred as Laura Ashley in the Rawhide episode "Incident of the Garden of Eden". She acted in a pair of films shot in Italy. Her final feature film was The Haunted Palace, a 1963 horror film directed by Roger Corman for American International Pictures. She did television work throughout her career. Her last performance in this medium came in a December 1965 episode of Burke's Law. She retired from entertainment in 1965, after marrying a wealthy oil executive, by whom she had one son, her only child.
Paget became a born-again Christian. She hosted her own show, An Interlude with Debra Paget on the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), a Christian network, in the early 1990s, and also was involved in Praise the Lord. She occasionally appears on TBN as a guest.
In 1987, the Motion Picture & Television Fund presented Paget with its Golden Boot Award, which is awarded to those actors, writers, directors and stunt crew who "have contributed so much to the development and preservation of the western tradition in film and television".
Read more about this topic: Debra Paget
Famous quotes containing the words leaving, studio and/or system:
“If mothers are to be successful in achieving their child-rearing goals, they must have the inner freedom to find their own value system and within that system to find what is acceptable to them and what is not. This means leaving behind the anxiety, but also the security, of simplistic good-bad formulations and deciding for themselves what they want to teach their children.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)
“Again and again, I struggled though the storm. Once I fainted—and it wasn’t in the script. I was hauled to the studio on a sled, thawed out with hot tea, and then brought back to the blizzard, where the others were waiting. We filmed all day and all night, stopping only to eat standing near a bonfire. We never went inside.... The blizzard never slackened.”
—Lillian Gish (1896–1993)
“The moral immune system of this country has been weakened and attacked, and the AIDS virus is the perfect metaphor for it. The malignant neglect of the last twelve years has led to breakdown of our country’s immune system, environmentally, culturally, politically, spiritually and physically.”
—Barbra Streisand (b. 1942)