Sic Transit Gloria : SUICIDE BLONDE: The Life of Gloria Grahame <i> by Vincent Curcio (William Morrow: $19.95; 319 pp., illustrated;</i> 0-688-06718-2)

All movie-star biographies begin as Cinderella stories. Happy endings, on the other hand, are harder to come by. Gloria Grahame’s life was no exception, though she did not commit suicide, as the title of Vincent Curcio’s doting biography might suggest. “Suicide Blonde” refers, somewhat cheekily, only to the subject’s hair, “dyed by her own hand.”

Grahame, born brunette in 1923, flourished briefly as a minor movie star during the 1950s. Her career reached it’s high-water mark early on, with a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1953 for her portrayal of a sexy Southern belle in “The Bad and the Beautiful.” She played supporting roles in other high-profile pictures of the era, including “Oklahoma!” as Ado Annie, the girl who just “can’t say no,” and “The Greatest Story Ever Told.”

But in the world of A-pictures, she never rose above supporting status; her manner and looks were just a little too offbeat for the mainstream. Instead, Grahame found movie immortality in the shadowy world of film noir, that grim cycle of nihilistic movies that flourished in the interstices of mainstream Hollywood during the ‘40s and ‘50s. With its introverted, masochistic, repressed sexuality, the genre found in the unglamorous Gloria a realistic anti-heroine, imperfect in all respects.

In noir classics like “Crossfire,” “In a Lonely Place” and “The Big Heat,” Gloria alternated between the two classic poles of noir femininity: battered victim or calculating succubus. Either way, she always exuded sex and neurosis, with special emphasis on the latter, and this biography provides enough sordid gossip about her private life to explain why.

Grahame made her Broadway debut at age 21, and it was there that she was spotted by MGM and signed to a movie contract. In Hollywood, she was a new face during the ‘40s, a star during the ‘50s, and then, before she’d even turned 40, a has-been.

After 1960, apart from small roles in episodic television and a few low-budget features, Grahame devoted the rest of her career to theater, her first home. Film making is an alluring mistress, as Ingmar Bergman once said, but the theater is a faithful wife. Gloria’s life onstage began at age 9 in a play directed by her mother. It ended when she died of cancer in 1981, in the middle of rehearsals for a revival of “The Glass Menagerie.”

Back in 1944, those MGM talent scouts were attracted by her youthful sex appeal, but they couldn’t figure out what to do with her until Frank Capra borrowed their new ingenue for a small part in his first postwar film, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” As Violet Bick, the brazen town tramp, Gloria made a vivid impression. And in a weird prefigurement of her future successes in film noir, Capra’s upbeat saga takes a brief but decidedly noir-ish turn during the Pottersville dream sequence when idyllic Bedford Falls is transmogrified into a hellishly inhuman urban landscape. James Stewart is horribly out of place there, but Grahame seems perfectly at home.

In Curcio’s biography, her real-life story reads like a textbook study of women in film noir. All four of her marriages were typified by violence, both emotional and physical. The blurring of the line between film noir and life noir reached its pinnacle in Grahame’s relationship with her second of four husbands, the director maudit , Nicholas Ray. Talk about picking the wrong guy. He brought to their marriage his own unique blend of gambling, drugs, drink and possessiveness.

Grahame and Ray made one film together, the deeply personal “In a Lonely Place” with Humphrey Bogart, just as their marriage was dissolving. It is her best work, perhaps Ray’s as well, and the film is a remarkable self-portrait of paranoia and doomed love.

But no film could do justice to the sordid nastiness of their actual relationship, a union that self-destructed in spectacular fashion when, according to this biography, Ray discovered his wife in flagrante delicto with his 13-year-old son by a former marriage! Amazingly, she married the stepson less than a decade later, and she bore him two children before their marriage, too, broke apart.

Perhaps the saddest and most revealing tidbit offered up by the author, who got to know Grahame toward the end of her life, was that at the height of her career she was so racked by insecurity about her looks that she repeatedly sought salvation beneath the knives of plastic surgeons.

She was particularly obsessed by her mouth, which, despite all protestations, she felt was inadequate. The surgical results were the opposite of those intended, so disfiguring her that her upper lip, scarred and often numb, had to be buttressed with wadded tissue and covered with layers of make-up.

Like the scar she bore in “The Big Heat”--given to her by her lover, played by Lee Marvin, who threw a pot of boiling coffee in her face--Grahame’s real-life self-mutilations are a horrible symbol of how the American dream of self-renewal could be turned upside down until it was a nightmarish trap that, try as one might, could not be escaped.

This inversion was the central theme of film noir. And the saddest fact of all about Gloria Grahame’s life was that it didn’t have to be true for her.

She was beautiful from the start. Anyone could see that, except her.