Barbara Loden

A one-time pin-up beauty and magazine story model, Barbara Loden studied acting in New York in the early 50s and was on the Broadway boards within the decade. She was discovered for films by legendary producer/director Elia Kazan who was impressed with what she did in a small role as Montgomery Clift's secretary in Wild River (1960).

He moved her up to feature status with her next role as Warren Beatty's wanton sister in his classic Splendor in the Grass (1961). As Kazan's protégé, she appeared as part of Kazan's stage company in the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater's production of After the Fall, winning the Tony and Outer Critic's Circle awards for that dazzling performance. An oddly entrancing, delicate blonde beauty possessed with a Marilyn Monroe-like vulnerability, she impressed in two of his other stage productions as well - But For Whom Charlie and The Changeling.

Won Broadway's 1964 Tony Award as Best Supporting or Featured Actress (Dramatic) for "After the Fall."

The character of Gwen in her second husband Elia Kazan's best-selling 1967 novel and later film, The Arrangement (1969) , was based on her. Gwen was played by Faye Dunaway in the 1969 movie, which was a terrible flop. Ironically, Dunaway had been Loden's understudy in the 1964 Broadway production of After the Fall (1974), for which Loden won the 1964 Tony Award for best featured actress in a play. The play, written by Arthur Miller, was directed by Kazan. According to Mark Harris in his 2008 book Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood (one of which was Bonnie and Clyde (1967), which made Dunaway a star), Dunaway as a tyro actress who was part of Kazan's Lincoln Center repertory company, carefully studied Loden's performance.

She was cast as Beverly Abbott in The Swimmer (1968), a crucial part in that she has had an affair with the title character, played by Burt Lancaster. According to multiple biographies of Lancaster, Loden's performance overshadowed him in the scene, which was shot in 1966 by Frank Perry, who is credited as the director on the film. Lancaster was dissatisfied and had the role recast with Janice Rule and had the scene reshot by Sydney Pollack. Friction between Lancaster and Perry led to the director leaving the film.

Barbara wrote, directed and starred, however, in a bold independent film entitled Wanda (1970) and became an unexpected art house darling, distinguishing herself as one of the few woman directors whose work was theatrically-released during the period. She won praise in all three departments, nabbing the Venice Film Festival's International Critics Prize. Supposedly discouraged by a doubting, perhaps even resentful Kazan, Barbara never followed up on this success.

After appearing in the failed movie Fade In (1973) with Burt Reynolds, she married Kazan and went into semi-retirement.

She had agreed to divorce Elia Kazan in 1979, but her diagnosis of breast cancer, and later, terminal liver cancer, stopped the proceedings.