- published: 15 Apr 2015
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Florence Nightingale Graham (December 31, 1884 – October 18, 1966), who went by the business name Elizabeth Arden, was a Canadian-American businesswoman who founded what is now Elizabeth Arden, Incorporated, and built a cosmetics empire in the United States. At the peak of her career, she was one of the wealthiest women in the world.
Arden was born in 1884 in Woodbridge, Ontario, Canada. Her parents had emigrated to Canada from Cornwall, United Kingdom in the 1870s. Her father, William Graham, was Scottish and her mother, Susan, was Cornish and had arranged for a wealthy aunt in Cornwall to pay for her children's education. Arden dropped out of nursing school in Toronto.
She then joined her elder brother in New York City, working briefly as a bookkeeper for the E.R. Squibb Pharmaceuticals Company. While there, Arden spent hours in their lab, learning about skincare. She then worked—again briefly—for Eleanor Adair, an early beauty culturist, as a "treatment girl".
In 1909 Arden formed a partnership with Elizabeth Hubbard, another culturist. When the partnership dissolved, she coined the business name "Elizabeth Arden" from her former partner and from Tennyson's poem "Enoch Arden". With a $6,000 loan from her brother, she then used the shop space to open her first salon on 5th Avenue. The name red door salon was also a stroke of genius. In those days, all building were grey in colour and looked alike so to create a point of difference, she painted the door to her salon red! Thus the name red door salon was born.
Actors: B.J. Ward (actress), Jan Tríska (actor), Anne Haney (actress), Elizabeth Taylor (actress), Richard Dysart (actor), Joyce Van Patten (actress), Jane Alexander (actress), Edith Fields (actress), Bonnie Bartlett (actress), Denise Crosby (actress), Tim Robbins (actor), Mark L. Taylor (actor), Jason Wingreen (actor), Nolan Miller (costume designer), Charles Bernstein (composer),
Plot: Struggling actress Hedda Hopper can't get a break in Hollywood, even though an acquaintence of hers is the extremely powerful gossip monger Louella Parsons - maker and breaker of careers (and lives) through her daily syndicated newspaper column. The big movie moguls, fed up with Parson's power over their stars, decide to de-claw her by setting up gossip Hopper as a competitor in the rumour industry. What they couldn't forsee was that Hopper would become as big as Parsons -- and every bit as much of a pain. Based on the true life stories of two of the most powerful (and arguably dangerous) women of Hollywood's hay-day.
Keywords: 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, actress, based-on-novel, based-on-true-story, docudrama, female-protagonist, film-critic, film-industry