She made it acceptable to play women who had sex lives and didn't apologize. Six Oscar nominations between 1929 and 1938, a Best Actress win for The Divorcee, and a string of roles - Coward, O'Neill, Shakespeare - where the characters wanted things and said so.
Also inDeutsch
Photos 12
Portrait of Shearer by Arnold Genthe, c. 1920
Norma Shearer's strabismus, 1926
Shearer in an early MGM publicity photo
Shearer in A Slave of Fashion (1925)
Shearer and Irving Thalberg outside the White House, 1929
Shearer and Thalberg on their wedding day, 1927
Norma Shearer holding her Best Actress award during the 3rd Academy Awards in November 1930.Filmography 40
The Women
He Who Gets Slapped
Way Down East
That's Entertainment!
The Divorcee
A Free Soul
Marie Antoinette
That's Entertainment! III
Romeo and Juliet
The Stolen Jools
The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg
The Hollywood Revue of 1929
Smilin' Through
The Barretts of Wimpole Street
Their Own Desire
Idiot's Delight
Private Lives
Escape
1925 Studio Tour
Lady of the Night
The Flapper
Thou Shalt Not: Sex, Sin and Censorship in Pre-Code Hollywood
The Last of Mrs. Cheyney
Going Hollywood
Vito
Complicated Women
Strange Interlude
Strangers May Kiss
Let Us Be Gay
The Christmas Party
A New Romance of Celluloid: The Miracle of Sound
Her Cardboard Lover
We Were Dancing
Riptide
The Making of a Legend: Gone with the Wind
The Devil's Circus
We’re Switching to Hollywood
The Trial of Mary Dugan
A Lady of Chance
Hollywood Out-takes and Rare Footage97 credits on file
Television 1
MGM ParadeAwards 4
In their orbit 8
Connected to Norma 6
About this person
Edith Norma Shearer was born in Canada in 1902 and started in film in 1919. Through the silent era and into the talkies, she carved out a type: spunky, sexually liberated, unrepentant. The Divorcee brought her the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1930, the first of six nominations across a career that ended in 1942. She took on prestige material - adaptations of playwrights and Shakespeare - and played them as modern women, not mannequins. Critics later called her a feminist pioneer for making singleness and sexual agency look chic on screen, a shift that registered because audiences saw it happening in real time.
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