Not So Sultry: Ella Raines

A birthday tribute, and a note about the Siren at Locarno 77 this weekend

The Siren doesn’t want anyone to take this as an attempt at weighty Sarris-esque categorization, but she’s always casually thought of the Thirties as a Blonde Decade (Lombard, Harlow, Constance Bennett, Dietrich, Blondell). Then, blonde Joan Bennett’s brunette dye job for 1938’s Trade Winds signals a shift to the Forties as a Brunette Decade (Gardner, Lamarr, Leigh, Tierney, Darnell, Lamour), with a big side of Auburn (Sheridan, Hayworth, Hayward). 

And Ella Raines, whose birthday is today, always seems perfectly 1940s, from her splendidly dark hair, to the variations in her movie career—westerns, comedies, adventure, with a strong dose of film noir and crime melodramas. 

She was born on Aug. 6, 1920, in Snoqualmie Falls, Washington, population 752 according to a profile in Screenland, July 1944. That same profile relates how Raines, between her junior and senior years at the University of Washington, went to light the stove in her apartment—and it exploded. Despite painful burns on her face and neck, Raines somehow wound up unscarred, though she returned that fall with “half her hair singed off and ugly patches all over her face.” After graduation, Raines married her high school sweetheart (a major in the Army Air Forces). As he went off to war duty, Raines, who had majored in drama, went to New York. There she wound up doing a screen test for super-agent Charles Feldman while recovering from a bout of ptomaine poisoning. She was tough as well as beautiful.