Overcoming these stumbling blocks in her private life, she went on to greater film success, eventually winning an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of concert pianist Sandra Kovak in The Great Lie (1941).

"[4] Astor was born in Quincy, Illinois, the only child of Otto Ludwig Wilhelm Langhanke and Helen Marie de Vasconcellos.

Her German father emigrated to the United States from Berlin in 1891 and became a naturalized U.S. citizen; her American mother was born in Jacksonville, Illinois, and had Portuguese roots.

Her name was changed to Mary Astor during a conference among Paramount Pictures chief Jesse Lasky, film producer Walter Wanger, and gossip columnist Louella Parsons.

[citation needed] Astor's first screen test was directed by Lillian Gish, who was so impressed with her recitation of Shakespeare that she shot a thousand feet of film with her.

[6] She made her debut at age 14[2] in the 1921 film Sentimental Tommy, but her small part in a dream sequence wound up on the cutting room floor.

The older actor wooed the young actress, but their relationship was severely constrained by Astor's parents' unwillingness to let the couple spend time alone together; Mary was only seventeen and underage.

Built by Marie Russak Hotchener, a Theosophist who had no formal architectural training, the house combines Moorish and Mission Revival styles and contains such Arts and Crafts features as art-glass windows (whose red lotus design Astor called "unfortunate"), and Batchelder tiles.

Astor's parents were not Theosophists, though the family was friendly with both Marie Hotchener and her husband Harry, prominent Theosophical Society members.

The following year when she was 19, Astor, fed up with her father's constant physical and psychological abuse as well as his control of her money, climbed from her second floor bedroom window and escaped to a hotel in Hollywood, as recounted in her memoirs.

On loan to Fox Film Corporation, Astor starred in Dressed to Kill (1928), which received good reviews, and the sophisticated comedy Dry Martini (also 1928).

He gave her a Packard automobile as a wedding present and the couple moved into a home high up on Lookout Mountain in Los Angeles above Beverly Hills.

As the film industry made the transition to talkies, Fox gave her a sound test, which she failed because the studio found her voice to be too deep.

During her time off, Astor took voice training and singing lessons with Francis Stuart,[7] an exponent of Francesco Lamperti, but no roles were offered.

Eldridge, who was to star in the stage play Among the Married at the Majestic Theatre in Downtown Los Angeles, recommended Astor for the second female lead.

On January 2, 1930, while filming sequences for the Fox movie Such Men Are Dangerous, Kenneth Hawks was killed in a mid-air plane crash over the Pacific.

When they returned to Southern California, Astor freelanced and gained the pivotal role of Barbara Willis in MGM's Red Dust (1932) with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow.

[10] With Walter Huston in the title role, Dodsworth received rave reviews on release, and the public's acceptance assured the studios that casting Astor remained a viable proposition.

As Sandra Kovak, the self-absorbed concert pianist who relinquishes her unborn child, her intermittent love interest was played by George Brent, but the film's star was Bette Davis.

The soundtrack of the movie in the scenes where she plays the concerto, with violent hand movements on the piano keyboard, was dubbed by pianist Max Rabinovitch.

Though usually cast in dramatic or melodramatic roles, Astor showed a flair for comedy as The Princess Centimillia in the Preston Sturges film, The Palm Beach Story (also 1942) for Paramount.

In February 1943, Astor's father, Otto Langhanke, died in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital as a result of a heart attack complicated by influenza.

She was also loaned to Paramount to play Fritzi Haller in Desert Fury (1947), the tough owner of a saloon and casino in a small mining town.

She acted frequently in TV during the ensuing years and appeared on many big shows of the time, including The United States Steel Hour, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Rawhide, Dr. Kildare, Burke's Law, and Ben Casey.

In 1954, she appeared in the episode "Fearful Hour" of the Gary Merrill NBC series Justice in the role of a desperately poor and aging film star who attempts suicide to avoid exposure as a thief.

Astor also tried her hand at fiction, writing the novels The Incredible Charley Carewe (1960), The Image of Kate (1962), which was published in 1964 in a German translation as Jahre und Tage, The O'Conners (1964), Goodbye, Darling, be Happy (1965), and A Place Called Saturday (1968).

She made a comeback in Return to Peyton Place (1961) playing Roberta Carter, the domineering mother who insists the "shocking" novel written by Allison Mackenzie should be banned from the school library, and received good reviews for her performance.

After a trip around the world in 1964, Astor was lured away from her Malibu, California home, where she was gardening and working on her third novel, to make what she decided would be her final film.

That same year, suffering from a chronic heart condition, she moved to a small cottage on the grounds of the Motion Picture & Television Country House, the industry's retirement facility in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, where she had a private table when she chose to eat in the resident dining room.

[21] Astor died on September 25, 1987, at age 81, of respiratory failure due to pulmonary emphysema while in the hospital at the Motion Picture House complex.