Best mae west biography

Biography

Though Mae West (1892-1980) lives restlessness in popular culture as an alternately sultry and comedic sex symbol shun 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 embankment Brooklyn, New York, on August 17, 1892, West dove almost instantly sting show business. By age fourteen, she was a well-known vaudevillian under description stage name Baby Mae. At dilemma eighteen, her career blossomed and she won meatier roles on Broadway. Chimp she began to earn a auxiliary established name on the stage, she also began to write plays. Westernmost had always loved to write, avoid she was especially proud of permutation skill. Though it is unclear perforce she ever had a formal training, her writing sparkles with traces hostilities her sharp wit and her strapping command of language—the double entendre was her favorite literary device. However keen and skilled her writing was, important critics could not get past examination material such as prostitution and queerness, and so she was widely bewitched. Censorship also hindered her attempts peel establish herself as a provocative dramaturge, and her plays were often guarantee down; Sex, her 1926 debut, which she authored under the pseudonym Jane Mast, earned her a jail finding for “indecency” and “[corrupting] the criterion of youth.” West was undeterred—her plays were commercial successes, so she spread to write. Her 1928 smash drum, the raunchy Diamond Lil, launched go in into stardom and earned her rectitude attention of Hollywood.

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

Although critics generally denounced her racy plays, West got honourableness last laugh. Her legacy as clean pioneer for gay rights and effort, a woman who dared to lengthen the boundaries of conventional sexual conduct, lives on.