The hard facts that birthed all the movies titled “A Star Is Born” played out in real life with far more drama and damnation than the fiction up there on the screen.
Whether the movie couple is Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper or Barbara Streisand and Kris Kristofferson or Judy Garland and James Mason or Janet Gaynor and Fredric March or Constance Bennett and Lowell Sherman, none of them ever captures the toxic mix of public glamour and domestic terror that were the real-life marriages of the famous couples who inspired Hollywood’s most filmed story of love found and man destroyed. When it comes to remakes, only “King Kong” rivals “A Star Is Born” in the category of narratives born at the movies. Among love stories, “Romeo and Juliet” came from the theater over 400 years ago; among horror classics, “Dracula” and “Frankenstein” began as 19th-century novels. “A Star Is Born” remains, by far, Hollywood’s favorite homegrown source material.
It was the silent film star Colleen Moore and her turbulent seven-year marriage to John McCormick that established the prototype of the successful older man who falls in love with a younger woman and single-handedly turns her into a movie star, only to see his own fame and power plummet just as hers ascends with inverse alacrity. In the 1920s, McCormick earned a salary of $100,000 a year as a top film executive – until he succumbed to chronic alcoholism, making substance abuse a hallmark of all the “A Star Is Born” movies. Equally dark, McCormick’s marriage to Moore put into dramatic display how, when two careers in show business move in opposite directions, it is the woman who must subjugate her own name and identity to protect his name and legacy, even in death. The final and most famous line from the first two films titled “A Star Is Born” makes it clear: “Hello, everybody! This is Mrs. Norman Maine.”
The makers of the 1976 and 2018 versions of “A Star Is Born” jiggered that line but never completely abandoned its sentiment and ethos, because the element of female sacrifice is central to the story, no matter how much Barbra Streisand ballyhooed that each film in the series offers a “stronger” female character. Her statement is far from true. None of the five female characters is ever more vulnerable and unsure of herself than Judy Garland’s Esther Blodgett, and none is more confident, resilient, and aware of the fleeting vapors of fame than Constance Bennett’s Mary Evans in the 1932 film that started it all, “What Price Hollywood?,” directed by George Cukor, who also brought the Garland remake to the screen.
Making $30,000 a week, Bennett was the highest paid person in Hollywood, male or female, and that salary didn’t go over well in the Depression era when Franklin Delano Roosevelt traveled America to defeat Herbert Hoover to become the 32nd president of the United States. In campaign speech after campaign speech, Roosevelt spoke of “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” More than a few reactionary voters believed that newly liberated women like Constance Bennett played a major role in taking away those jobs from men.
Women having to subjugate themselves even further to the opposite sex would be the greatest appeal for producer David O. Selznick to turn his “What Price Hollywood?” into his “A Star Is Born” only five years later. The ritual where the woman casts off her last name and takes her husband’s is as old as the institution of marriage itself. Hollywood in 1927 gave it a novel twist. Only the year before the “Exhibitor’s Herald” held its annual poll of over 2,500 theater owners, and they voted a brunette pixie named Colleen Moore the number one box office attraction in the country – none of which prevented her from burying her celebrity under the precarious bushel of her producer-husband’s job at their home studio, First National Pictures. She did it to rescue his floundering career in Hollywood.
“This is Mrs. John McCormick,” the actress said by way of introduction. The timing of that cross-country phone conversation was crucial. Moore phoned Richard Rowland in the studio’s New York Office only days, maybe hours, before he could bring down the axe on her husband. “I just called to say hello,” she added.
Rowland knew instinctively that “just” wasn’t’ the half of it. He got the full message: The movie boss had every reason to fire McCormick, an increasingly incompetent drunk in his job as head of production. Moore made it clear with her phone call that if her husband were fired, she Hollywood’s top box office attraction, would not renew her contract with First National. McCormick made Moore a star when he put her in the 1923 hit “Flaming Youth,” playing the screen’s first ever flapper.
Over the years, the “A Star Is Born” franchise has depended on regular injections of real-life soap opera to keep it current. The self-inflicted death by gunshot of Lowell Sherman’s character Max Carey in “What Price Hollywood?” reflected the many suicides that plagued the industry in its transition to sound. Several actors and directors, making thousands of dollars a week, suddenly found themselves out of work.
Barbara Stanwyck’s humiliating marriage to first husband Frank Fay found its way into the 1937 “A Star Is Born” through director William A. Wellman, a close friend of the actress. Before Stanwyck divorced Fay in 1935, the actress swallowed her enormous fame to appear on the vaudeville stage with her alcoholic husband to keep him employed. Gossip columnist Louella Parsons even went so far as to observe, “A scattered few think it just sweet that Barbara is willing to give up a flourishing [movie] career for her husband. The most thought, practical souls are frankly worried over the future of the little red-haired girl who is content to bask in the shadow of Frank Fay’s fame.”
The rock and roll deaths of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison in the early 1970s continue to echo in Kris Kristofferson’s performance in the 1976 remake. A more violent death of a rocker made its way into the 2018 version of “A Star Is Born.” Bradley Cooper, its director and star, had originally intended the male lead character to take his life by drowning, the means of self-destruction used in the first two “Star” films. Then, during the last weeks of filming, Cooper changed the cause of his character’s death when Chris Cornell committed suicide on May 18, 2017. The grunge star hanged himself in a Detroit hotel room only hours after performing at the city’s Fox Theatre.
None of [the adaptations] ever captures the toxic mix of public glamour and domestic terror that were the real-life marriages of the famous couples who inspired Hollywood’s most filmed story of love found and man destroyed.
Cooper came to Ravi Mehta the very next day. “Dude, I know the ending. He has to hang himself,” he informed the film’s executive producer.
The Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand versions of “A Star Is Born” brought other dynamics into play, ones that took place behind the scenes. In a reversal of the female star being born from the rib of her male lover, B-picture movie producer Sid Luft used his wife’s comeback vehicle to produce his first (and only) major picture, starring Garland in 1954. Two decades later, Beverly Hills hairdresser John Peter used his famous girlfriend’s enormous box office clout to produce his first major motion picture, starring Streisand in 1976.
It would be difficult to say which novice producer, Luft or Peters, received worse press when their respective remakes were announced.
“Our daily life became a hornet’s nest of publicity,” said Luft. “The media was unrelenting.” And for good reason. He turned out to be a nearly incompetent producer, the budget on his “Star” exploding to a point that doomed its success at the box office. “A charming fellow, Sid,” opined Jack Warner, whose studio would release all the “Star” remakes. “He’s one of the original guys who promised his parents he’d never work a day in his life – and made good.”
Peters remembered with off-color his career switch. “When I left that [hair] business and went into this [movie] one, all I read was that I was a pimp and a conniver and a nobody latching on to a star’s wings.”
Peter also harbored the distinct disadvantage of plotting a power grab even greater and more outrageous than Luft’s. Streisand’s new boyfriend announced that he would not only producer “A Star Is Born” but would also direct the film and be its male lead. Frank Pierson, who ended up directing the second remake, described Peters as a guy “whose motion picture experience was a previous marriage to an actress,” Lesley Ann Warren.
Decades later, Streisand described the fragile psyche of Peters. “And it was so important for his ego that I didn’t fight him or make him feel bad by pointing out that he needed help on everything,” she reported in her memoir.
It was fiction reflecting reality. The success of any film titled “A Star Is Born” depends on two factors: female sacrifice and the frangible ego of the male species.
The first three “Star” films, rather than duplicating the star-is-born legend, took a world-famous actress and reinvented her for public consumption. Janet Gaynor, the first actress ever to win an Oscar, in 1929, experienced a huge comeback with the 1937 version then retired two years later. Garland played her most dramatic role onscreen after she attempted suicide, endured electroshock treatments and spent four years off the screen. As for Streisand, she was finally not “playing Ray Stark’s mother-in-law” yet again, as Peters so ruefully described her Fanny Brice impersonations in “Funny Girl” and “Funny Lady,” which tanked at the box office in 1975.
Finally, in 2018, Lady Gaga became the first actress to use the vehicle as a film debut, receiving an Oscar nomination for her effort; and while Bradley Cooper never brought the nothing-but-the-warts portrayal of his real-life counterpart John McCormick to the screen, to his credit he closely matched the unsentimental portrayal of a faded and floundering talent that Lowell Sherman delivered with his soused, destitute, and ultimately self-destructive star-maker in “What Price Hollywood?”
Moviegoers may have to wait the usual 20 years, or even 40, before another version of the show business legend is remade again. Theatergoers are luckier. Warner Theatricals is at work on “A Star Is Born” musical for the Broadway stage.
“A Star Is Reborn” by Robert Hofler is now available for purchase via Kensington Publishing’s Citadel Press. Its release coincides with the 50th anniversary of the 1976 classic film version starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson.
Copyright 2026 by Robert Hofler.
