A budding poet, she had her first works published in the school newspaper and played Jo in a student production of 'Little Women.' At her own insistence, Tierney was packed off to finishing school in Switzerland, to the Brillantmont International School in Lausanne.Īt Brillantmont, Tierney spoke only French and spent Christmas holidays with fellow students in England and Norway. Margaret’s School in Waterbury, which her mother had attended as a child, Tierney continued her studies at the arts-centered Unquowa School in Fairfield. Over the years, Howard Tierney would buy up increasing amounts of the surrounding land, ultimately building a more ostentatious family manor in the meadow across the street and filling it with servants and a German nanny for his three children. When Tierney was five, the family traded Brooklyn for a modest country home in Green’s Farms, CT. The second of three children of insurance broker Howard Sherwood Tierney and the former Belle Lavina Taylor, Tierney was named after a maternal uncle who had died from diabetes at age 17.

Tierney’s 1979 memoirs laid bare the devastation wrought by her inner demons while allowing the troubled actress to emerge on the far side of her troubles at some measure of peace with her legacy as 'the most beautiful woman in film history.' president, and a devastating bipolar disorder that effectively quashed her career. Her personal life was no less dramatic, punctuated by a controversial marriage to designer Oleg Cassini, the traumatic birth of her first child, whose severe mental retardation resulted in lifelong institutionalization, love affairs with several leading men and a future U.S. Muir' (1947), Tierney attained a strata of celebrity that put her on par with fellow sirens Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner and Ava Gardner. Stahl’s 'Leave Her to Heaven' (1945), to a maturity and grace far beyond her years in Joseph L. Gliding seamlessly from smoldering sensuality in Preminger’s 'Laura' (1944), to sang froid psychopathy in John M. Honing her craft under extreme conditions – she brooked the tempers of such autocratic émigrés as Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch and Otto Preminger – Tierney emerged as a leading lady of equal beauty and depth. When Paramount Pictures fumbled Gene Tierney’s proposed film debut in its aborted adaptation of 'National Velvet,' 20th Century Fox saw promise in the gimlet-eyed beauty with the regal cheekbones and curiously beguiling overbite.

Self portrait by gene tierney