Oscar Winner Mary Astor Is Dead at 81

Mary Astor, whose piercing eyes and finely honed features made her the essential star to one generation of Americans and whose portrayals of mature but flawed women kept her fame bright through yet another, died early today.

The actress, who in her later years lamented the time she had spent before the camera, was 81 and died in the Motion Picture Country Hospital in Woodland Hills where she had led a solitary existence for many years.

She had retired to the home in 1971 and been in the hospital since 1986. Her death was attributed to respiratory complications.

During a career that spanned 45 years, Miss Astor appeared in 109 films, among them classics such as “The Maltese Falcon” with Humphrey Bogart and “The Great Lie” with Bette Davis. For the latter, she won an Academy Award for best supporting actress in 1942.

But Miss Astor, born Lucile Langhanke, was a star whose real dream, she discovered, was to be a writer. When she retired from films in 1964, she reminisced, “During the first two months of hanging around the Famous Players-Lasky studio in Astoria, I distinctly remember feeling, ‘Is that all?’ Glamour is in the eye of the movie fan.”

Late in life, after she won a measure of independence from not only the parents who had pushed her into movies but from four unhappy marriages and alcohol, she discovered her love of writing. She published five novels and two autobiographies.

Some early writing, an infamous diary, became one of Hollywood’s juiciest scandals in 1936, when her second husband, Dr. Franklyn Thorpe, included it as evidence of “immoral conduct” in a custody battle over their daughter, Marylyn.

Tame excerpts, such as a romance with playwright George Kaufman, leaked to the press, but rumor had it that certain pages held pornographic descriptions of affairs with some of Hollywood’s biggest male stars, with box scores on their performances. An out-of-court agreement was reached and the diary---which Miss Astor always denied contained anything lurid--was destroyed by court order in 1952.

She made her first film, a silent called “John Smith” in 1922 and her last, “Youngblood Hawke” in 1964. In between were “Dodsworth,” “The Prisoner of Zenda,” “Brigham Young--Frontiersman,” “Thousands Cheer,” “Little Women,” and “Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte.”