Mary Astor
American actress and author (1906–1987)
Mary Astor (born Lucile Vasconcellos Langhanke; May 3, 1906 – September 25, 1987) was an American actress. Although her career spanned several decades, she may be best remembered for her performance as Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon (1941).
Astor began her long motion picture career when a teenager in the silent movies of the early 1920s. When talkies arrived, her voice was initially considered too masculine and she was off the screen for a year. After she appeared in a play with her friend Florence Eldridge, film offers returned, and she resumed her career in sound pictures.
In 1936, Astor's career was nearly destroyed by scandal. She had an affair with the playwright George S. Kaufman and was branded an adulterous wife by her former husband during a custody fight over their daughter. Overcoming these stumbling blocks in her private life, she went on to greater film success, eventually winning an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of the concert pianist Sandra Kovak in The Great Lie (1941).
Astor was a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract player through most of the 1940s and continued to work in film, television and on stage until her retirement in 1964. She authored five novels.
“Mary Astor” enters the record as american actress and author (1906–1987). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Mary, Astor and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q232109. VIAF identifies the subject as 19864453. The Library of Congress control number is n86034206. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1906, 1987, 1941 and 1936.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mary Astor” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.