Lana Turner

Lana Turner played Cora Smith in The Postman Always Rings Twice, which Tay Garnett made from James M. Cain's novel in 1946: the young wife of Nick, a middle-aged alcoholic running a roadside diner near Los Angeles. Frank, taken on at the diner, begins to take an interest in her, and Cora persuades him that the only road to happiness runs through killing Nick and collecting the insurance. Eleven years later, in Peyton Place, which Mark Robson adapted from Grace Metalious's novel, she was Constance MacKenzie, a young widow keeping the town's dress shop: distant and rule-bound, at odds with her daughter Allison, and in one moment of anger throwing it coldly in the girl's face that she was born out of wedlock. Turner accounted for one of that film's nine Oscar nominations, hers being for a leading role.