Let's take a look at Barbara Loden who went from being a pin-up model and award-winning actress to directing a truly nuanced independent film Wanda that became the thing she would really be known for.
Barbara Loden was originally from a small town in North Carolina. Since she was so beautiful, she knew that she could make a living off of her looks and talent. She became a model and started auditioning for plays which wound up being the start of her career. She even won the Tony for her role in the play After the Fall by Arthur Miller for her portrayal of a character that was pretty clearly based on Marilyn Monroe. Playing Marilyn Monroe meant that this blonde bombshell was essentially next-in-line for being Marilyn.
She was in a relationship with director Elia Kazan and their relationship was a little contentious. It began as an affair while she was married to her other husband. She became pregnant with Elia's baby and had the kid while married to her other husband. When she finally divorced her hubby, she gave Elia Kazan an ultimatum. They had been together for seven years, but he didn't agree to marry her right away. Finally, they moved in together and got married - living together with their then four-year-old son - for the first time. Around this time Barbara shot a movie called Fade-In which gave us a closeup of one of her breasts. It's a strange film and it was not reviewed well by critics, but it did feature a close look at Barbara's boob.
Barbara was offered $100,000 by Harry Schuster to make her own movie. Kazan always seemed jealous and wary of Barbara's success. He claims that she changed after they finally got married, but he had also distanced himself from her after her Tony win and seemed to "punish her" by casting her in his films in very small roles after her theatrical breakthrough. Then he published the book The Arrangement which was a fictional account of his midlife crisis that he claimed to have been going through around the time that he began his affair with Barbara. Whoops! His character Gwen in the book is so clearly based on Barbara and it made her uncomfortable and mad. It got worse when The Arrangement was later made into a film starring Faye Dunaway as Gwen...and Barbara was cut out of the cast. Talk about rubbing salt on a wound, Elia!
Barbara complained that Faye was a "lousy interpretation" of her. This was the nail-in-the-coffin for their marriage. They both began seeing other people which may have been the push that Barbara needed to prove herself with her directorial debut.
Then came Wanda. Barbara stars in the 1970 film, but she also directed it which is an incredibly difficult and unique thing to do. Oh, AND she wrote it. Elia Kazan tried to take credit for writing some of it, but we know that Barbara really did the work. There's too much of her heart in the movie for her not to have written it. She plays the titular character that she based on the true story of a female bank robber who thanked the judge for sending her to prison. That story had stuck in Barbara's brain for years because she could not believe a woman would do that. This inspired the story of a poor white woman in rural Pennsylvania who is at the end of her rope. Barbara really related to this woman because she also came from a poor background and she often considered getting out of her hometown to be one of her greatest accomplishments. She felt that she could relate to this woman, that this character was a version of her that never left her hometown. Whether she's a Hollywood starlet or a rural Pennsylvania housewife, she looks skincredible when she gets out of bed nude and puts on her underwear.
She did not want Wanda to be seen as a romantic film at all. She saw it as a film about drifters - do we sense a sort of pre-Nomadland vibe? - who drift through life without a real sense of purpose and sometimes commit crimes out of necessity. She described the film as being "anti-glamour" and an attempt to show something that Hollywood wasn't showing at the time. Wanda premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 1970 and she immediately won awards and was praised for this film. When asked about why she made this film, Wanda offered this quote: "If you don't want to be a part of what exists, then you have to create your own reason for existence." She was a cool, independent filmmaker at a time when that was really just beginning. Not only that, but Barbara WAS deeply in Hollywood as an actress and Elia Kazan's wife and this film was her rebellion against all of that. Here she was saying 'I've seen and experienced glamour and I'm sick of it'. How cool is that? It really was a big move for the blonde bombshell wife of a major Hollywood director to make an experimental film of her own.
After this film, she started teaching and she even taught acting to Christopher Reeves. She announced intentions to make a few more films, but those films never got made. She and Kazan finally agreed to divorce, but then Barbara was diagnosed with breast cancer and Kazan helped her fight through her sickness. When she lost her hair, she wore her Marilyn wig from After the Fall and most people had no idea that she was sick. She passed away on September 5th, 1980. According to Kazan, her last words her "shit!"
The nudity in Wanda isn't that explicit, so check out her performance in Fade-In in which we fade in on her close-up sex scene with Burt Reynolds:
