"Peg" Entwistle
(5 February 1908 – c. 16 September 1932)
Welsh-born English stage and screen actress. Entwistle began her stage career in 1925, appearing in several Broadway productions. She appeared in only one film, Thirteen Women, (in the film she commites suicide)
which was released after her death. Entwistle gained notoriety after she jumped to her death from the "H" on the Hollywoodland sign
in September 1932, at the age of 24.
Peg Entwistle played the role of "Hedvig" in Henrik Ibsen's The Wild Duck during 1925. After seeing the play, a young wanna be acrtress named Bette Davis told her mother,
"...I want to be exactly like Peg Entwistle."
Some years later Broadway director Blanche Yurka sent a note to Davis asking if she would like to play Hedvig and she sent word back that ever since she had seen Entwistle in
The Wild Duck, she knew she would someday play Hedvig.
Through the years Davis said Entwistle was her inspiration to take up acting.
In April 1927 Entwistle married actor Robert Keith at the chapel of the New York City Clerk's office. She was granted a divorce in May 1929. Along with charges of cruelty, she claimed her husband did not tell her he had been married before and was the father of a six-year-old boy, Brian Keith, who later became an actor,
(famous for his role in the 60s TV series Family Affair) and who himself committed suicide.
and drawn from the novel by Tiffany Thayer.
Entwistle played a small supporting role as Hazel Cousins. It premiered on 14 October 1932, a month after her death, at the Roxy Theatre in New York City and was released in Los Angeles on 11 November to neither critical nor commercial success. By the time it was re-released in 1935, 14 minutes had been cut from the film's original 73 minute running length. In 2008 Variety magazine cited
Thirteen Women as one of the earliest "female ensemble" films.
Thirteen Women as one of the earliest "female ensemble" films.
On 18 September 1932, an anonymous woman telephoned the Los Angeles police and said that while hiking she had found a woman's shoe, purse and jacket below the Hollywoodland sign (now known as the Hollywood Sign). The woman said she looked in the purse and found a suicide note. She then said she looked down the mountain and saw a body. According to a police transcript of the call, the woman said she "wrapped a jacket, shoes and purse in a bundle and laid them on the steps of the Hollywood Police Station."
A detective and two radio car officers found the body of a moderately well-dressed, blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman in a ravine below the sign. Entwistle remained unidentified until her uncle (at whose Beachwood Canyon home she had been living) connected her two-day absence with the description and initials "P.E." on a suicide note which had been found in the purse and published by the newspapers.
He said that on Friday, 16 September she had told him she was going for a walk to a drugstore and see some friends. The police surmised that instead she made her way to the nearby southern slope of Mount Lee to the foot of the Hollywoodland sign, climbed a workman's ladder to the top of the "H" and jumped. The cause of death was listed by the coroner as "multiple fractures of the pelvis."
The suicide note as published read:
it would have saved a lot of pain. P.E."
Entwistle's death brought wide and often sensationalized publicity. Her funeral was held at the WM Strathers Mortuary in Hollywood on 20 September.
Her body was cremated and the ashes were later sent to Glendale, Ohio, for burial next to her father in Oak Hill Cemetery, where they were interred on 5 January 1933.
In 2014, roughly one hundred people marked the anniversary of Entwistle's death by gathering in the parking lot of Beachwood Market in Hollywood to watch
Thirteen Women on an outdoor screen. Proceeds from a raffle and from food and beverages sold at the screening were donated to the
American Foundation for Suicide Prevention in Entwistle's name
POOR LITTLE PEG TOOK HER LIFE THE OTHER DAY.
STOOD ON THE H AND SHOUTED~ "HURRAY!"
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