Lana Turner in popular culture

Her subsequent rise to fame at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and establishment as a sex symbol enhanced Turner's profile, and she became a popular pin-up model throughout World War II.

While she enjoyed significant popularity as one of MGM's biggest stars, she was also subject to vociferous media attention over her numerous romantic affairs, eight total marriages, and her daughter's 1958 killing of Turner's lover, Johnny Stompanato, during a domestic struggle.

In her later career and after her death, Turner would go on to appear depicted in numerous artistic works, as well as be studied by social critics and academics in discussions surrounding Hollywood, film theory, gay icons, and camp aesthetics.

[5]Scholar Kim Fields similarly wrote about the lasting cultural relevance of Turner and her discovery story in her 2007 book An Intimate Affair: Women, Lingerie, and Sexuality, noting that it is emblematic of "the American Dream fulfilled ... Because of her, being discovered at a soda fountain has become almost as cherished an ideal as being born in a log cabin.

"[2] Following her feature film debut in Mervyn LeRoy's They Won't Forget (1937), Turner was the first woman to receive the nickname the "Sweater Girl" due to her form-fitting attire which accentuated her bust.

[11] Several years after the release of They Won't Forget, Modern Screen journalist Nancy Squires wrote an extensive article on Turner, in which she noted that she had "made a sweater look like something Cleopatra was saving for the next visiting Caesar.

[18] In 1962, writer Harold Robbins published the novel Where Love Has Gone, which was inspired by the scandal surrounding Turner after her daughter, Cheryl Crane, stabbed her lover, Johnny Stompanato, to death during a domestic struggle in their Beverly Hills home.

[24] Also in 1990, Turner was referenced on the rap section of Madonna's "Vogue" next to stars from the Golden Age era of Hollywood such as Rita Hayworth, Lauren Bacall, and Marilyn Monroe.

[25] Despite her recurring prevalence in popular culture, upon her death in 1995, writer and critic John Updike wrote in The New Yorker that Turner "was a faded period piece, an old-fashioned glamour queen whose fifty-four films, over four decades didn't amount, retrospectively to much ... As a performer, she was purely a studio-made product.

[30] Beginning in the 1970s, it was observed by journalist Sally Quinn of The Washington Post that Turner had accumulated a following of gay men,[31] similar to her contemporaries Judy Garland, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and others.

To Ross Hunter, a closeted gay man unaroused by female flesh, Lana without the sweater meant the opportunity to dress her up in two dozen stunning outfits, like a live Barbie doll.

Hunter, hugely abetted by Douglas Sirk, created an entirely new goddess, a Lana Turner who, like Myra Breckinridge, embodies heterosexual and homosexual camp while remaining oddly sexless.