On this day in 1968, stage and screen actress Tallulah Bankhead dies at the age of 65. Although few of Bankhead’s plays and films were critical successes, Bankhead’s unrestrained personality, boisterous laugh, and irreverent behavior won her many fans in the United States and England.

Bankhead was born to a prominent Alabama family in 1903. Her father, William Brockman Bankhead, was a U.S. congressman and served as Speaker of the House. After a conservative religious education, Bankhead won a beauty contest in her teens and made her Broadway debut in 1918 in Squab Farm. In 1923, she moved to England, where she starred in numerous plays and made two movies. She returned to New York in the 1930s, appearing in plays including The Little Foxes (1939), The Skin of Our Teeth (1943), and Private Lives (1947). Among her movies were Faithless (1932) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944).