She won a beauty contest at age fourteen. In 1920 her mother, Edith Shearer, took Norma and her sister Athole Shearer (Mrs. Howard Hawks) to New York. Ziegfeld rejected her for his "Follies" but she got work as an extra in several movies. Irving Thalberg had seen her early efforts and, when he joined Louis B. Mayer in 1923, gave her a five year contract. He thought she should retire after their marriage, but she wanted bigger parts. Her first talkie was in The Trial of Mary Dugan; four movies later she won an Oscar in The Divorcee. She intentionally cut down film exposure during the thirties, relying on major roles in Thalberg's prestige projects: The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Romeo and Juliet (her fifth Oscar nomination). Thalberg died of pneumonia September 1936, aged thirty-seven. Norma wanted to retire but MGM more-or-less forced her into a six-picture contract. David O. Selznick offered her the part of Scarlett O'Hara, but public objection killed the deal. She starred in The Women, turned down the starring role in Mrs. Miniver, and retired in 1942. Later that year she married Sun Valley ski instructor Martin Arrouge, twenty years younger than she (he waived community property rights). From then on she shunned the limelight; she was in very poor health the last decade of her life.



Marie Antoinette (1938): $150,000

Children, with Thalberg, Irving Jr. (1930-1988) and Katherine (1935-2006). Daughter of Edith Shearer. Interred at Forest Lawn, Glendale, California, USA, in the Great Mausoleum, Sanctuary of Benediction, alongside her first husband Irving Thalberg. Sister-in-law of Howard Hawks. At the height of her career, she was earning $6,000 per week. Six years after the death of first husband Irving Thalberg, she married a ski instructor 20 years her junior and retired from the screen forever. Her son died in 1988 of cancer. He was a philosophy professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Was meticulous about her appearance. Early in her career, she spent money she could barely afford on the services on an eye doctor, who trained her to strengthen a weak eye. She swam everyday, had massages to firm her figure, and dieted religiously. She experimented with make-up until she decided on a light tone that would illuminate her face on screen. She is one of the celebrities whose picture Anne Frank placed on the wall of her bedroom in the "Secret Annex" while in hiding during the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam. In 1927, she insisted on firing the director Viktor Tourjansky because he was unsure of her cross-eyed stare. She is commemorated on one of a set of postage stamps (issued in 2008) honoring prominent Canadians in Hollywood. The other stamps feature Marie Dressler, Chief Dan George and Raymond Burr. She has there granddaughters from her daughter: Ashley (b. circa 1962), Brooke (b. circa 1964), and Deva (b. circa 1966).