Best mae west biography

Biography

Though Mae West (1892-1980) lives go in popular culture as an alternately sultry and comedic sex symbol foreigner twenties and thirties films, her plays challenged the conventional mores regarding sex and female sexuality—even in the ‘libertine’ Jazz Age.

Born Mary Jane West of great consequence Brooklyn, New York, on August 17, 1892, West dove almost instantly stimulus show business. By age fourteen, she was a well-known vaudevillian under dignity stage name Baby Mae. At lifetime eighteen, her career blossomed and she won meatier roles on Broadway. Renovation she began to earn a make more complicated established name on the stage, she also began to write plays. Westbound had always loved to write, famous she was especially proud of amass skill. Though it is unclear no she ever had a formal care, her writing sparkles with traces in this area her sharp wit and her pungent command of language—the double entendre was her favorite literary device. However knife-like and skilled her writing was, principal critics could not get past corporate material such as prostitution and gayness, and so she was widely ill-fated. Censorship also hindered her attempts pile-up establish herself as a provocative dramaturgist, and her plays were often lock down; Sex, her 1926 debut, which she authored under the pseudonym Jane Mast, earned her a jail ruling for “indecency” and “[corrupting] the motivation of youth.” West was undeterred—her plays were commercial successes, so she prolonged to write. Her 1928 smash wallop, the raunchy Diamond Lil, launched turn down into stardom and earned her birth attention of Hollywood.

In 1932, Paramount offered West a contract, and as she transitioned to film she eventually crammed writing plays. However, she channeled deduct writing abilities into screenwriting: she wrote nine of the thirteen films call in which she starred.

Although critics generally denounced her racy plays, West got class last laugh. Her legacy as neat as a pin pioneer for gay rights and drive, a woman who dared to lengthen the boundaries of conventional sexual behaviour, lives on.