Florenz Ziegfeld turned her down for a role in his Follies because he said she was too short, had fat legs, crooked teeth, and a wandering eye. She wasn’t the most good-looking or talented hopeful to want a career in the movies. Yet by dint of perseverance and determination (and a doctor who fixed her eye condition), Norma Shearer became the “First Lady of the Screen,” married a studio boss, and was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood during the late 1920s and ‘30s, nominated six times for an Academy Award, winning one in 1930.

Born in 1902 in Montreal to wealthy parents who lost their construction business in World War I, Shearer’s stage mother left her manic-depressive husband and took her two daughters to New York to repair the family fortunes in the fledgling film business.

At first, Shearer toiled in bit roles, and worked as an extra in a D.W. Griffith movie; the director told her she’d never make it with her eye problem. Getting by on modeling work – she was known as Miss Lotta Miles for her promotion of car tires – she was finally signed to a six-month contract in 1923 with Louis B. Mayer after she was noticed in her fourth-billed role in The Stealers.

Shearer moved to Los Angeles. For $250 a week she was cast in forgettable roles, deemed ‘unphotogenic’ and untalented by a couple of directors; she lost a much-hoped-for lead in The Wanters. Taking matters into her own hands, she started visiting VP of production Irving Thalberg to plead for better roles. Thalberg was known as the ‘Boy Wonder’ in the industry, being the youngest studio executive at 24. He finally gave Shearer her first big-budget film, Ernst Lubitsch’s The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg in 1927, and later that year they married after she converted to Judaism.

Thalberg’s project was to make his wife a huge movie star and he used the power of his position to secure the best roles for her at MGM, making sure she was happy with her director and co-stars, lavishing money on her productions, and ensuring they were properly publicized and marketed.

But she had her detractors. Playwright Lillian Hellman remarked snidely that she had “a face unclouded by thought,” while writer Anita Loos had this to say: “It is to Irving’s credit that, by expert showmanship and a judicious choice of camera angles, he made a beauty and a star out of Mrs. Thalberg.”

Undaunted, Shearer continued working, making films like The Wolf Man with John Gilbert and He Who Gets Slapped with Lon Chaney, both big hits in 1924 after Mayer merged his studio with Metro and the Samuel Goldwyn Company to become MGM. Her salary was raised to $1,000 a week, soon to rise to $5,000, and she became one of MGM’s biggest stars. She made 13 silent films for MGM.

Shearer was also one of the few actors who made a successful transition to sound films with the help of voice lessons and her brother Douglas, a sound engineer for MGM. Her first talkie, The Trial of Mary Dugan, released in 1929, was another hit, with her playing a Broadway showgirl on trial for murdering her lover, followed by other successes like Let Us Be Gay (1930), and Strangers May Kiss (1930).

The same year came the Oscar-winning role of a divorcee who returns to her husband in The Divorcee, a role she had to fight for by posing in racy photos to convince her husband to cast her. Shearer also made the pre-Code films A Free Soul (1931), Private Lives (1931), and Strange Interlude (1932) to great success.

Riptide in 1934 raised the ire of the Legion of Decency with its storyline of a woman who has to choose between her husband and boyfriend. Shearer was called a ‘loose and immoral woman.’ The Production Code with its regulations for self-censorship by the studios regarding language and storylines dealing with sex and crime went into effect that same year.

Shearer repaired her image as a sexually liberated woman by moving on to films with a literary or historical pedigree, such as The Barretts of Wimpole Street in 1934, Romeo and Juliet in 1936 (she was in her mid-30s then and the mother of two children, playing Shakespeare’s 13-year-old heroine opposite Leslie Howard) and Marie Antoinette in 1938 with a production budget of $2.5 million. The latter two lost money but Shearer’s star was undimmed.

Then Thalberg died of pneumonia at age 37 in 1936; he had suffered from a weak heart his whole life. Shearer emerged from mourning after a year and a half and went on to make six more films for MGM under a new contract, even though she sued the studio to make sure Thalberg was still receiving his producer percentages, going public with her fight to gossip columnist Louella Parsons.

Thalberg’s estate was paid more than $1 million when MGM lost the battle. She turned down the leads in Sunset Boulevard, Now, Voyager, and Mrs. Miniver. She also refused the role of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, saying, “Scarlett O’Hara is going to be a thankless and difficult role. The part I’d like to play is Rhett Butler.” Then she made arguably her best film, The Women in 1939, the all-woman cast included Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, and Paulette Goddard.

After Thalberg’s death, there were a few affairs documented by the press, notably with James Stewart, Mickey Rooney, and George Raft who she wanted to marry her, but whose wife refused to grant him a divorce.

Shearer retired in 1942 and married a former ski instructor, Martin Arrougé, a man 11 years younger than her. They remained together until her death in 1983 of pneumonia at the age of 80 at the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills, California. She is buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, her grave marked Norma Arrougé.