About Me
Hello there, my name is Norma Shearer. I was born in Montreal, Canada, with the name Edith Norma Shearer, on August 10, 1902. I started acting in New York in the early 1910s and gradually attained better and better roles. Eventually, I moved with my mother and sister out to Los Angeles, CA. Irving Thalberg spotted me and gave me a lovely contract. After we married, he took an even more personal interest in my career. I made my first sound film, The Trial of Mary Dugan, and then won an Academy Award for The Divorce in 1929. I made scores of films in the early 1930s, my favorites being Private Lives, Smilin' Through, Strange Interlude, Riptide, and A Free Soul. In all I was nominated for six Best Actress Academy Awards (two were in one year!). Following the insitution of the production code, my roles began to change. My first post-code movie was The Barretts of Wimpole Street. Then I made Romeo and Juliet, just before the death of my husband Irving. It was after his death that I made my favorite of my pictures, Marie Antoinette. It was my last Oscar nomination. In 1939, I made The Women and Idiot's Delight, and in 1940 I made a picture entitled Escape with Alla Nazimova and Robert Taylor. Two more pictures followed, Her Cardboard Lover and We Were Dancing, but their mediocrity and poor reviews convinced me to retire and let my legend live on without me tarnishing it. I left film and remarried, to a ski instructor named Martin Arrouge.
