Mae West

Mae West (1893-1980), American actor, a master of the double entendre, known for her portrayals of defiantly sexy women of lost virtue and irreverent wit. With her platinum-blond hair, buxom figure, distinctive walk, and drawling, seductive speech, West became an anti-Puritan icon, both reviled and admired for her disdain of conventional morals.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, she worked as a child actor before moving to vaudeville and musical comedy. Her appearances on Broadway in her plays Sex (1926) and Diamond Lil (1928; motion-picture version, She Done Him Wrong,1933) gained her a national reputation. Her subsequent film career at Paramount Pictures began with a success: Night After Night (1932). This was soon followed by two other hits: She Done Him Wrong (1933; an adaptation of Diamond Lil) and I'm No Angel (1933). By 1935 she was the highest-paid woman in the United States, but her flamboyance had stimulated opposition—partly in the form of the new Motion Picture Production Code—and her more decorous films of the late 1930s and early 1940s lacked the force of her early work. She appeared with W. C. Fields in My Little Chickadee (1940), which they cowrote.

West returned to the stage with a Broadway revue, Catherine Was Great (1944), later touring in Diamond Lil and finding great success with a glamorous nightclub act. She reappeared on film in 1970 in Myra Breckinridge and in 1978 in Sextette, still playing signature roles in her 70s and 80s. In addition to her scripts, she wrote several novels and an autobiography, Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It (1959).