This piece was originally published in Issue 5 of Notebook magazine as part of a broader exploration of the instructional form. The magazine is available via direct subscription or in select stores around the world.
On October 18, 1962, TWA flight 801 from Rome touched down at New York’s Idlewild Airport. Among the passengers was an actress by the name of Dolores Hart, and she was more anxious on the ground than she was in the air. Hart was the star of MGM’s forthcoming sex romp, Come Fly With Me (Henry Levin, 1963), about three airline hostesses looking to score rich husbands. The film had wrapped in Vienna in August, and Hart was scheduled for a grueling cross-country promotional campaign. But that wasn’t what had her anxious. Just days before her 24th birthday, Hart was wrestling with the idea of ditching the film industry and—despite smooching Elvis Presley in Loving You (Hal Kanter, 1957), defending a girl’s right to make out in Where the Boys Are (Henry Levin, 1960), and seducing a smuggler in Come Fly With Me—becoming a nun. But how was she going to manage it?
For every Meryl Streep or Robert De Niro who’ve continued to build on their craft year after year, there are others who, having tasted the wine of success, decide to become teetotalers. Whether leaving the film industry has been for God, politics, love, one’s own integrity, or a sense of ennui, it has required a series of steps and explanations to fully break free. The effort has gotten more difficult over the years. For Gene Gauntier, one of the very first movie stars, it was relatively painless to bow out in 1920. The studio era was just coming into existence by that time, bringing with it a regimentation that Gauntier couldn’t abide and an attention from the public that she found overbearing. So, she simply quit, shocking the industry, and turned her attention to writing novels that warned of the costs of stardom.
Gauntier had left before long-term studio contracts. Dolores Hart, however, as she stepped off that plane, was legally bound to not one but two studios. Could contracts be broken by claiming it was God’s will? A year or so earlier, Hart had had a spiritual epiphany visiting the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut. It wasn’t that she’d been unhappy in her movie career—she was often called “the new Grace Kelly”—but she’d consistently found something missing. Not even the pay raise her agent Harry Bernsen was negotiating, or a prospective marriage to “a swell guy” satisfied her. “I was held by a kind of madness that I could not express,” Hart wrote in her memoir.1 The spirit and tranquility of Regina Laudis had moved her in ways she hadn’t expected, and she’d come to believe that only a religious vocation could bring her peace and contentment.
And so, from the moment she returned to Hollywood in late 1962, the young actress began planning her escape. Anyone who leaves the film industry has to navigate a series of steps. For some, like Gauntier, it’s a painless process. For Grace Kelly, to whom Hart was compared, it was also an easy exit: Who could argue that becoming a princess wasn’t a step up? (According to some accounts, Kelly “hated” cutthroat Hollywood and wanted out.2) But Hart had to tread more delicately. As she hadn’t yet received final approval from the Archbishop of Hartford, she continued to go through the paces, which put her in a moral quandary. Tasked with silence by the abbey, she had no choice but to watch awkwardly as Bernsen lined her up for Honeymoon Hotel (Henry Levin, 1964), her third film in a four-picture deal with MGM, while the producer Hal Wallis, to whom she was also under contract, penciled her in for a film with John Sturges. She knew her agency would be furious if she backed out, “and not only over lost commissions,” Hart said. Even worse would be making “them look foolish by letting them negotiate commitments” that she was not going to fulfill.3
Loving You (Hal Kanter, 1957).
During the spring of 1963, Hart soldiered through the twelve-city personal appearance tour for Come Fly With Me. In a series of radio and TV spots and newspaper interviews, she summoned the charm and irreverence the Hollywood press had come to expect from her. She adorned her hotel rooms with unflattering photos of herself. In one, she sat cross-eyed wearing her Come Fly With Me uniform above a caption that read, “It’s my turn to sit in the captain’s lap!” Another showed her in an embrace with Elvis, under which she’d scrawled, “Now scratch a little to the left.”4 Hart wrote: “I balked at the notion that a woman is incomplete without the love and companionship of a man.”5 If she was leaving the industry, this was the way to do it. Publicize the picture, make money for the studio, and display a strength of character so no one could claim she’d been seduced or lured away. With her engagement called off, some reporters asked Hart if she was seeing anyone new. She decided to have some fun with her answer. Yes, indeed, there was someone in her life. Was he wealthy, the reporters wanted to know. Oh, yes, Hart replied: “Very rich.” The analogy, she felt, was apt. While in New York, she was able to sneak away to Connecticut for some quiet reflection at Regina Laudis. “This is where I belonged,” she said. “It’s the kind of feeling you get when you meet the person you’re going to marry.”6
Finally, the Archbishop accepted her as a postulant, and Hart could reveal her truth to the world. Perhaps not surprisingly, the first person she told was her publicist, Frank Liberman. She’d been in Hollywood long enough to know that a good publicist can handle anything, even a former good-time girl leaving the industry for a nunnery. Liberman crafted an exit strategy. Rather than giving any one columnist the story, he prepared a brief statement that was sent out to everyone at once; this would allow them to maintain some control over the narrative. Hart insisted she wasn’t departing the industry with any bad feeling. “I am taking with me a full and grateful heart,” she said.7 At the last minute, however, gossip maven Hedda Hopper got wind of the story and led off with it for her Los Angeles Times column. All the other papers ran Hart’s official statement, undercutting Hopper’s scoop. The columnist sent Liberman a two-word note. He didn’t need to tell people what the two words were.
Liberman also set up what amounted to an exit interview with Photoplay, which was less for Hart’s benefit than Hollywood’s. Although Hart could no longer speak on the record, she gave permission to friends to speak for her. The article made the industry look beneficent, supportive, and respectful of Hart’s decision. Hal Wallis sang her praises and wished her all the best. In truth, the producer was furious and told Hart not to come back crying to him. “I understood that,” Hart wrote, “because I was breaking [his] professional expectation of truth. That was a profound step in his reality of life.”8 Agent Harry Bernsen wasn’t any happier. Only reluctantly did he extract her from her contracts. He sent her a gold-plated razor blade with a note: “You’ve just committed suicide.”
It’s not easy for some in the industry to believe that anyone would want to leave, or that they might ever truly be satisfied doing something else. It calls into question, perhaps, their own commitment and fealty to the system. In the Photoplay article, Hart was quoted as saying, “The life you offered me, Hollywood, held no meaning for me.”9 Whether they were her words or not, she sounded the same note decades later when, as Mother Superior of Regina Laudis, she told a reporter she understood why people in the biz had been so angry with her. “It just offends so many that I would somehow look at that and say…there is something more important. Because for most persons, success and money and fame are the things that really make life worthwhile, and so you don’t just dismiss that.”10
Grand Hotel (Edmund Goulding, 1932).
When Hart withdrew from Hollywood, her mother took to calling her “Garbo,” another famous example of someone who walked away. Nearly a century ago, Greta Garbo turned her line from Grand Hotel (1932)—“I want to be alone”—into her own personal mantra. Unlike Hart, however, Garbo didn’t leave the industry with any set plan or goal for a new life: she just vanished. Since she’d arrived in Hollywood from Sweden in 1925, she’d been resistant to the image MGM assigned her as an exotic seductress. An introvert since childhood, she couldn’t comprehend that people she didn’t know had opinions about her life. “I go nowhere, see no one,” Garbo wrote to her friend, the Austrian writer Salka Viertel, in 1937, near the height of her career.11 Living in the glass house of fame, she was forced to hide the fact that she was living, unmarried, with her co-star John Gilbert and, later, was romantically involved with the playwright Mercedes de Acosta. She couldn’t understand why people followed her when she walked to the market, in trousers, old shoes, and without any makeup. “I hate lipstick,” she told Lillian Gish.12
Clare Booth Luce called Garbo “a deer, in the body of a woman, living resentfully in the Hollywood zoo.”13 Forever dreaming about running away, Garbo finally bolted after the failure of her film Two-Faced Woman (George Cukor, 1941). No one thought her career was over. The war had merely cut off her important European market, and she’d be back. That’s what the studio said. But Garbo never made another movie. Critics blamed Two-Faced Woman, but that was “a grotesque over-simplification,” said Cukor, the film’s director. “I think that what really happened was that she just gave up. She didn’t want to go on.”14
Whereas Dolores Hart bowed out with a public statement and Grace Kelly with fairy-tale headlines, Garbo just drifted away, and in the process, created a legend for herself. Many attempts were made to lure her back—Billy Wilder wanted her for Sunset Boulevard (1950)—but things always fell through, usually because of her own reluctance. Garbo spent the last 40 years of her life in New York doing her best to be anonymous despite fans’ pastime of “Garbo hunting.” Whether she was happier away from the spotlight is arguable, but at least she didn’t have to put on lipstick when she went to the market.
The Duke Steps Out (James Cruze, 1929).
Sometimes dissatisfaction with the industry isn’t as vague as Garbo’s sense of being “trapped on a beautiful cloud,” as her contemporary, Lillian Gish reflected.15 Sometimes dissatisfaction with the industry arises from deep, personal outrage that leaves no choice but to leave, and in the most public way possible. William Haines was the number one box-office star of 1930. He was also gay, a fact known and accommodated by the MGM brass and Hollywood press, who were often guests at the home he shared with his partner, Jimmie Shields. Turns out, Hollywood wasn’t always a destroyer of queer lives. Billy Haines had it a lot easier than Rock Hudson thirty years later. Not until 1934, with the enforcement of the Production Code to stave off boycotts threatened by the Catholic Church, did Haines’s queerness become a concern. The Code, in the argot of Variety, wanted to purge “the dual-sex boys and lesbos” from the screen.16 Haines played straight on the screen, of course, but his leading men lacked the sort of Depression-era toughness (think Clark Gable) that the times now demanded. And fan magazines were beginning to ask why Haines wasn’t married.
So, Louis B. Mayer issued an ultimatum: Give up Shields and get married (to a woman). Haines refused. Somewhat naïvely, he figured another studio would hire him, but he’d become untouchable. “After that,” one of Haines’s friends said, “if you were homosexual, you had to pretend, hide, lie, and be terrified all the time.”17 Other queer stars were also pressured to straighten upon their images. Cary Grant left Randolph Scott, married Virginia Cherrill, and promptly had a nervous breakdown.18 Haines was the only one out of dozens who refused to play the studio’s game and, as such, few remember him anymore. He had the last laugh, though, when he became the most sought-after interior designer in Hollywood (even Mayer’s wife hired him). He and Jimmie Shields were together for 50 years. Joan Crawford called theirs “the happiest marriage in Hollywood.”19
Piccadilly (E. A. Dupont, 1929).
Anna May Wong also fell victim to the Code, prompting her to exit the industry. The Chinese-American actor, after becoming a major star in Germany and Britain, where she played opposite white leading men without much public comment, returned home in 1930 to find the only roles offered to her were exotic villains and mysterious ladies of the night. “In Germany, they wrote pictures for me,” she said, but in Hollywood there were “few roles that I can play.”20 She was even passed over for films with Asian lead characters. For Clarence Brown’s The Son-Daughter in 1932, MGM put the Irish actor Helen Hayes in yellowface. Wong wrote to her friend, the writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten, that she was apparently “too Chinese to play a Chinese.”21
Yet it was the heartache over losing The Good Earth (1937), Sidney Franklin’s adaptation of Pearl S. Buck’s novel about Chinese villagers, that proved to be the breaking point. Wong had been mentioned by columnists for several years as the obvious choice to play O-lan, the moral center of the film. But when the studio cast the Ukrainian Jewish Paul Muni as O-lan’s husband, Wong was no longer an option: The Production Code forbade miscegenation, which meant an Asian actor could not play the romantic lead opposite a white leading man. Instead, MGM cast the Austrian Luise Rainer as O-lan. Wong was asked to read for the smaller part of a devious villager. “You’re asking me, with Chinese blood,” Wong replied, as she recounted for Modern Screen, “to do the only unsympathetic role in a picture featuring an [all-white] cast portraying Chinese characters.”22 With that, Anna May Wong left the film industry, embarking on a year-long tour of China.
One might argue that both Wong and Haines were forced out of the business, but in truth they made conscious choices to leave. Haines could have gotten married and kept Jimmie Shields on the side; plenty of gay actors went that route, from Grant to Anthony Perkins. Wong could have made a living playing stereotypical characters; many actors of color did. Each ultimately made decisions that movie fame was simply not worth the sacrifice of their integrity. Wong went on to write a series of articles about Chinese culture and history, and footage she’d taken during her time in China became a documentary. She did some TV work, then a very distinct industry from film, starring in The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong (Wong’s real surname) in 1951. She played a detective, probably the first female private eye on television. It lasted a season. Wong died in 1961, mostly forgotten, at least until her recent rediscovery.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma, 2019).
More recently, Adèle Haenel’s departure was swift and entirely on her own terms. The star of Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma, 2019), announced her withdrawal from movies in May 2023, blaming what she called the “general complacency” of the French film industry in its treatment of sexual harassment and assault.23 In a letter to the magazine Télérama, she wrote, “I decided to politicize my retirement from cinema to denounce…the way in which this sphere collaborates with the mortal, ecocidal, racist order of the world such as it is.”24
The winner of two César awards, Haenel had previously accused the director Christophe Ruggia of sexually abusing her between the ages of twelve and fifteen. Yet her retreat was as much political as it was personal. “If I stayed today in this film industry,” she wrote, “I would be a kind of feminist guarantee to this masculine and patriarchal industry.” Not long before, she’d withdrawn from Bruno Dumont’s film The Empire (2024) over jokes about sexual violence. “I tried to discuss it with Dumont,” said Haenel, “because I thought a dialogue was possible. I wanted to believe for the umpteenth time that it was not intentional. But it’s intentional. This disregard is deliberate.” Had there been powerful political constituencies for Haines and Wong at the time of their departures, as there would be for Haenel in 2023, perhaps people would have rallied behind them.
A Touch of Class (Melvin Frank, 1973).
It’s not only political passion but also political ambition that has often provided a successful offramp from the film industry. In 1966, after nearly thirty years on the screen, Ronald Reagan was more concerned about the rise of the welfare state than he was about movie scripts, using his name recognition to coast into the California Governor’s Mansion. After a few tries, he made it to the White House in 1980, the first actor to become President of the United States. Likewise, Glenda Jackson, even after two Oscars, two Emmys, and a BAFTA award, found herself more passionate about fighting Thatcherism than she was about her next big role, and in 1992 ran for, and won, a seat in the UK Parliament, representing Hampstead and Highgate. Jackson remained an MP for the next 23 years. When I interviewed her in 2003, in the House of Commons, she had just finished delivering a powerful speech against the war in Iraq. “There are things more important than acting.”25 Her time in Parliament, she said, was “every bit as exciting and far more essential” than her time on the screen. “There’s backstabbing,” she said of politics, “but not as much as the film industry.”
Stories of regret from those who managed to leave are few and far between. Grace Kelly, lonely within the walls of her palace, reportedly planned a return to the screen until Monegasque public sentiment dissuaded her. But Mother Dolores Hart has been happy in her convent, noting that movie success can be fleeting, especially for women. “I have seen so many people come and go,” she said. “Most women in Hollywood only work until their early 40s. You can’t bank on your career being a given.”26 William Haines enjoyed his second life as an interior designer, where he could be who he was, far more than in his first. When Billy Wilder offered him a part in Sunset Boulevard, Haines, like Garbo, declined. “I’m no waxwork,” he reportedly replied.
There have been no regrets coming from Daniel Day-Lewis, either. After completing Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread in 2017, the man widely considered the best actor of his generation wrote finis across his acting career. The three-time Oscar winner had mused over the years about giving it all up, taking long breaks between projects. This time, he made it official. Like Dolores Hart, he turned to his publicist to make a statement on his behalf: “Daniel Day-Lewis will no longer be working as an actor. He is immensely grateful to all of his collaborators and audiences over the many years. This is a private decision and neither he nor his representatives will make any further comment on this subject.”27 It wasn’t so different, really, from Hart’s statement 54 years earlier, offering gratitude, and finality, to the industry, except that Day-Lewis wasn’t on his way to a monastery. This lack of a new goal left many speculating he would be back.
Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2017).
Exiting the industry is quite different in the twenty-first century than it was in the twentieth. Adèle Haenel’s departure was followed by intense commentary across social media, some applauding her courage and others disparaging her convictions. Day-Lewis caused chatter as well. The fact that he wasn’t specific about his reasons for leaving has allowed various motivations to be read into his decision. Comments that “Daniel hates acting,” made in 2007 by Jim Sheridan, who’d directed Day-Lewis in his breakout film My Left Foot (1989) as well as In the Name of the Father (1993) and The Boxer (1997), were recycled across the internet.28 When Day-Lewis finally agreed to elaborate to W magazine, he was still vague. “All my life,” he said, “I’ve mouthed off about how I should stop acting, and I don’t know why it was different this time, but the impulse to quit took root in me, and that became a compulsion. It was something I had to do.”29 He added, “I need to believe in the value of what I’m doing. The work can seem vital, irresistible, even. And if an audience believes it, that should be good enough for me. But lately, it isn’t.”
At the same time, Day-Lewis talks a great deal about how much he values the creative process, whether that’s building a character or making a dress, which he learned to do for Phantom Thread. As a youth, Day-Lewis had studied woodworking, with the goal of becoming a craftsman. “Being in a workshop is like food and drink to me,” he told W magazine. “I love that sense of creation.” His acceptance into the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School at the age of nineteen left him conflicted: Did he want to be an actor or a cabinetmaker? It’s a question he wrestled with from that day on. As the years went by, only someone he respected, such as Martin Scorsese, could lure him back to the soundstages. That’s why, in 2017, he put out that statement, which he admitted was uncharacteristic for him. “But I did want to draw a line,” he said. “I didn’t want to get sucked back into another project.”
So far, he hasn’t. He’s become an expert shoemaker and has built a lot of cabinets. But the reality of today’s film industry means that everyone is constantly watching and making up their own minds on whether he’s in or out. He showed up to present Scorsese with the Best Director prize for Killers of the Flower Moon at the National Board of Review gala in New York. Day-Lewis has made two films with Scorsese (The Age of Innocence [1993] and Gangs of New York [2002]) and after accepting the award, the director expressed his wish for “one more.” Day-Lewis was later spotted with Jim Sheridan and Steven Spielberg; paparazzi snapped him wearing a black wool hat and tinted glasses. The internet declared they were all planning a new film. Sheridan quickly doused the rumors. “He says he’s done,” he told Screen Daily, as if that would settle the matter.30
No one believed Garbo was done, either, until at least twenty years had passed. Maybe it will take that long for Day-Lewis. Leaving the film industry, it seems, is akin to giving up one’s citizenship.
“They will not let you go quietly,” remarked the reporter from W.
Day-Lewis smiled. “They will have to,” he said.
We shall see.
- Dolores Hart and Richard DeNeut, The Ear of the Heart: An Actress’s Journey from Hollywood to Holy Vows (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), 174. ↩
- Pete Martin, “Screen Sirens of Hollywood: Grace Kelly Rules the Movies,” Saturday Evening Post, July 17, 2017. ↩
- Hart and DeNeut, The Ear of the Heart, 185. ↩
- Pittsburgh Press, June 8, 1963, 8. ↩
- Hart and DeNeut, The Ear of the Heart, 169. ↩
- Stephanie Nolasco, “Mother Dolores Hart Explains Why She Left Hollywood to become a nun: ‘God called me,’” Fox News, January 6, 2021. ↩
- Sacramento Bee, June 12, 1963, 12. ↩
- Jessica Pickens, “Hollywood for Habit: An interview with the actress who left Hollywood to become a nun,” Gaston Gazette, September 21, 2013. ↩
- Photoplay, September 1963, 58. ↩
- Washington Post, June 23, 2013, 8. ↩
- Barry Paris, Garbo: A Biography (New York: Alfred K. Knopf, 1995), 161. ↩
- Author’s interview with Lillian Gish, February 11, 1982. ↩
- Vanity Fair, February 1932, 85. ↩
- Paris, Garbo, 383. ↩
- Author’s interview with Lillian Gish. ↩
- Variety, February 28, 1933, 2. ↩
- Author’s interview with Robert Wheaton, March 27, 1996, for my book Wisecracker: The Life and Times of William Haines (New York: Viking, 1998). ↩
- See, among many other sources, David Canfield, “Cary Grant and Randolph Scott’s Hollywood Story: ‘Our Souls Didn’t Touch,’” Vanity Fair, January 2024. ↩
- Mann, Wisecracker, 278. ↩
- Graham Russell, Anna May Wong: From Laundryman’s Daughter to Hollywood Legend (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 113. ↩
- Yunte Huang, Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong’s Rendezvous with American History (New York, Liveright, 2023), 226. ↩
- Modern Screen, December 1937, 80. ↩
- David Mouriquand, “French actress Adèle Haenel quits film industry over ‘complacency’ towards sexual predators,” Euronews, May 10, 2023. ↩
- This quote has been translated from French to English. “‘J’ai décidé de politiser mon arrêt du cinéma’: la lettre d’Adèle Haenel à ‘Télérama,’” Télérama, May 10, 2023. ↩
- Author’s interview with Glenda Jackson, March 17, 2003, for my book Edge of Midnight: The Life of John Schlesinger (London: Hutchinson, 2004). ↩
- Pickens, “Hollywood for Habit.” ↩
- Brent Lang, “Shocker! Daniel Day-Lewis Quits Acting,” Variety, June 20, 2017. ↩
- New York Times Magazine, November 11, 2007. ↩
- Lynn Hirschberg, “Daniel Day-Lewis Opens Up about Giving Up Acting after Phantom Thread,” W, November 28, 2017. ↩
- Screen Daily, March 3, 2024. ↩