Mae West - A Movie Queen with Sex Appeal

Because of her free-spirited views on sexuality she was hated by some and loved by others, but a smile never left her face.

The star of showbusiness is born

Mae was born in 1893 in Brooklyn. Her father was a boxer and her mother was earning money by sewing corsets and she also tried to make it on stage. Mae was interested in performing from an early age  on and she played in theater plays since she was 5 years old. She performed in the so-called 'vaudeville' genre: a popular theater form of the time, which combined dancing, singing and the performances of magicians and animals. 

A young Mae West adored the combination of all these elements and she quickly became addicted to praise from the audience. She soon became the co-author of numerous comedies and dramas, which had one recognizing ingredient - free sexual thinking often spiced up with jokes about sex.

Bold about sexuality

She wrote and also performed in a theater play called Sex in 1926, which was a real shock for an era when sexuality was not even publicly discussed and female emancipation was far away. The authorities were shocked because of her sincere story of a prostitute from Montreal who decides to leave her business and get a wealthy husband.

They didn't like the tale of a freethinking and decisive woman. Mae had to go to jail for ten days because her play was considered scandalous. Two years later she wrote a sexual play The Pleasure Man which upset the public even more. Because the main character was a homosexual man, a very open Mae, who never had any inhibitions towards any kind of sexual expression, was brought to trial.

She got attention for every project she was working on because she was completely different from an image of a fragile woman, which was the ideal of the time. She was intelligent and she didn't hide her love for men and sexuality. Her play Diamond Lil was also daring because it talked about alcoholism and seduction, and it also made it to the movie screens under a different name and image, called She done him wrong.

Sex goddess on a movie screen 

Mae West got her first part in her own movie and her co-actor was Cary Grant, a man every woman was crazy about at the time. Platinum blond Mae played Lady Lou who has many lovers. The movie got an Oscar for the best picture and it made Mae famous but, on the other hand, the movie industry had a lot of work with censoring her works, which were made into movies only after all the 'dangerous' quotations and scenes were removed. Her most fertile era was between the 1930s and early 40s, but she played a fatal woman in a movie Sextette when she was 85 years old.

Some laughed at her, wondering why such an old lady plays a seductress, but others congratulated her audacity which was again way ahead of the time. Everyone remembers Mae as an optimistic and sexy lady who once naughtily said:''I generally avoid temptation unless I can't resist it.''

Read also about the modern porn goddess, Jenna Jameson!

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