Lana Turner plays a woman who leaves her small town to go to New York to get into the modeling business.
It's a magazine-fiction type of story that is given some depth, intelligence, and color by George Cukor's direction.
Cukor does all sorts of nice things with the milieu, the supporting cast, the situations, and the performances of the leads, perhaps to obscure the fact that this isn't a very compelling story.
Predictably, Lana's character gets involved with a married man (Ray Milland). Her lover's long- suffering wife (Margaret Phillips) is bedridden. The man cares about his wife, but also about his girlfriend. He nearly goes off the deep end worrying about it all.
Ann Dvorak in a supporting role as an aging, bitter model steals the show, more or less, though a little of her (and her role) goes a long way. We also get to see Barry Sullivan, Tom Ewell, Jean Hagen, Betsy Blair, Richard Hart, Louis Calhern, and many others. The supporting cast is really great.
By the way, Ray Milland was a replacement for Wendell Corey, who reportedly was fired after making a snide remark when Lana was late to the set (for an apparently legitimate reason having to do with her wardrobe). Supposedly, Corey told Turner that Barbara Stanwyck (with whom he had recently starred) never kept a cast and crew waiting. Since there were rumors Lana had had an affair with Stanwyck's husband, Robert Taylor, the crack seemed especially pointed. At any rate, Lana refused to work with him after that.
A Life Of Her Own was one of two pictures produced by MGM's influential Voldemar Vetluguin, a former editor of Redbook magazine. The other was East Side, West Side (1949).
