I'll Cry Tomorrow

Lillian Roth loses her childhood to her ambitious mother's direction and becomes a star of Broadway and Hollywood before she is twenty. On the point of marrying, her fiancé dies. After that loss she starts drinking and lives with alcoholism for years. Directed by Daniel Mann, the film was adapted from Roth's own book, published in 1954 and sold in the millions. The telling neither excuses the addiction nor turns it into a moral lesson, and it does not make recovery look easy either. Susan Hayward plays Lillian and was nominated for an Oscar for it, and took the best actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1956. The film is unusually direct for its period; it does not shy from showing the collapse behind the fame.