Jean Peters was born Elizabeth Jean Peters in Canton, Ohio on 15 October 1926. She was the daughter of Elizabeth and Geral Peters, a laundry manager. She attended the University of Michigan and Ohio State University. While she was studying for a teaching degree at the latter university, she entered the Miss Ohio State Pageant in 1945 and won. Her grand prize was a screen test with Twentieth-Century Fox, where she secured an acting contract.
Peters married a Texas oilman, Stuart Cramer, but divorced him in 1957. She then married Howard Hughes shortly after he started his eccentric behaviors. But, he was rich, and she retired from acting during her marriage to Hughes. They divorced in 1971, and Peters agreed to a lifetime alimony payment of $70,000 annually and waived all claims to Hughes' estate. That same year she married Stanley Hough, an executive with Twentieth-Century Fox.
Peters was known as a "sexy spitfire," and she starred in period dramas and Westerns. Her first film with Tyrone Power, Captain from Castile (1947) was a huge hit. She won the part of Candy in Pickup on South Street (1953) over Marilyn Monroe. Peters and Monroe starred together in another film that year, Niagara. The image above is of Peters and Marlon Brando in the 1952 film, Viva Zapata!
After nearly 20 years, Peters returned to acting in the 1973 public television production of Sherwood Anderson's ''Winesburg, Ohio'' and made a rare network TV appearance in the 1976 NBC miniseries, `"Arthur Hailey's 'The Moneychangers'"' Her last acting role was in the CBS television movie `"Peter and Paul,'' produced by her third husband.
Peters died in 2000 in Carlsbad, California from leukemia two days before her 74th birthday. |