DYAN CANNON

Dyan Cannon was born Samile Diane Friesen in Washington State in 1937. This super sexy blonde got some TV roles in 1958, and her first movie role the next year (billed as "Diane Cannon"), but she was mostly stuck in sexpot type roles (for example, she was "Wiggles" in This Rebel Breed), She started a relationship with Cary Grant, who was 33 years older than her, and she mostly only appeared on TV in the early 1960s. She married Grant in 1965 (he was 61 and it was his fourth marriage) and they had a child (the only child she or Grant ever had), and she stopped acting entirely. They were divorced in 1968, and she returned to acting with a supporting role in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for this film). She appeared in five movies in 1971 alone, but then made only a few appearances in the rest of the 1970s. In 1976 she produced, directed, wrote, edited, and acted in the short film Number On, which was nominated for an Oscar for Best Short Film-Live Action film. Two years later she played the wife in Heaven Can Wait (nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for this film). She appeared in a number of forgettable movies in the 1980s, and in 1990 she wrote, directed and starred in The End of Innocence, the story of a woman who spends her life trying to make others happy and ends up in a rehab center, and one wonders if she almost certainly wasn't telling her own life story. Cannon was a multi-talented beautiful actress who received three Oscar nominations, and yet it does not seem like her career amounted to nearly as much as it might have, had she made a few different choices over her lifetime. As of 2021, she is still alive at the age of 84!