And the cop questions her and that’s when you find that the girl is living with an older

And the cop questions her, and that’s when you find that the girl is living with an older guy (Paul Kelly). You’re not sure if they’re married or not, but you’re grabbed by the mood between them: perverse, mocking, all done as an act, but frightening.Crossfire is a good film; but in this one small scene, it’s great. You could cut the scene out, but you couldn’t forget the blonde girl with the sweet acid way of talking, and the deliberate dead front. Where did such knowledge come from at 22? Well, Gloria Grahame had been married for a year or so to a young actor, Stanley Clements, but that broke up because she was on the rise and he wasn’t She had a small role in It’s a Wonderful Life. She got noticed in Crossfire, and one of the people who looked up was Nicholas Ray.

The director and Gloria were married in 1948, and they made In a Lonely Place together (that is her biggie), where she is the girl who thinks maybe she can rescue screenwriter Humphrey Bogart until she sees that his dark charm is not just self-destructive but close to murderous, too. It’s one of the best movies about Hollywood ever made.Nick and Gloria were on the rocks by the time the picture came out, no matter how heady their union may have seemed for a few months. He gambled; he had a roving eye; and if he could find the wrong thing to do, he’d do it. She was still rising, or so it seemed: she was cute and funny as the elephant girl in Cecil B De Mille’s The Greatest Show on Earth, which won Best Picture for 1952. And she got her supporting part Oscar as the Southern wife to writer Dick Powell in The Bad and the Beautiful.

That was a sweet, clever job, in a role about a fifth as good as the one in Crossfire.She married for the third time, to producer Cy Howard, and that lasted three years. She was brilliant again as Lee Marvin’s girl in The Big Heat – the film where she gets the scalding coffee thrown in her face. The Big Heat was made by Fritz Lang, and he used her again in Human Desire. She was in Not As a Stranger, The Cobweb and Oklahoma!, but there wasn’t much more She darkened her hair, and tried to lose weight But her unique look had gone. By the end of the 1950s, she was a has-been.In May 1960, when she was 36, Gloria Grahame entered into her fourth marriage – to Anthony Ray (then aged 23), the son of Nick by his first marriage.

There’s not much more I can tell you, except that this marriage didn’t last long, and that Gloria died of cancer in 1981, having tried several comebacks, one of which occurred in British provincial theatre (Grahame was flown back from Liverpool a few days before her death in New York).Now, I know, there’s no such thing as profit from experience. If you could tell the whole story to our bus-station girl, she’d be teary at the end and she’d say, “What a great role that would be – the Gloria Grahame story.” She might suggest that you write it. Which isn’t the craziest idea, because it offers a likely explanation – that people as sad or fated as Gloria Grahame are carried along finally to the extent that they don’t really believe in the reality of their own mess. They think they’re playing a part, and they know the scene, the big finish, where, at death’s door, they say they wouldn’t have done one thing differently.

But it’s hard if you’re supposed to take proper notes on the wreckage.Film Stars Don’t Die…, a season of Grahame films continues at the NFT, SE1 (0207 928 3232) until the end of February. Film-makers like to bring other film-makers back from the grave. For some reason, anyone who directed a black-and-white horror or sci-fi movie seems to be particularly ripe for exhumation, with Ian McKellen playing James Whale in Gods And Monsters and Johnny Depp donning a pink angora sweater for Tim Burton’s Ed Wood Now it’s the turn of FW Murnau. In 1922, the German director made Nosferatu, a Dracula film in all but name, and one that is still considered to be unsurpassed in its field. (If you want to judge for yourself, it’s just been re-released on video, although it’s saddled with an annoying synthesiser-heavy score and mispunctuated captions.) Shadow of the Vampire imagines what went on behind the scenes. Film-makers like to bring other film-makers back from the grave.