Evelyn Keyes

The veteran actress who played Scarlett O’Hara’s sister

Evelyn Keyes

1916–2008

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In her long career, Evelyn Keyes made dozens of movies, among them Union Pacific, The Buccaneer, and The Jolson Story. She was also married to and romantically involved with some of the entertain­ment industry’s most famous men. But Keyes was best known for what she called her “bit part” as Scarlett O’Hara’s sister Suellen in the 1939 epic Gone With the Wind. In her most memorable line, she pouted that Vivien Leigh’s vixenish Scarlett had stolen her fiancé: “She’ll have had three husbands and I’ll be an old maid!”

Born in Port Arthur, Texas, Keyes “danced professionally as Goldie Keyes before moving to Hollywood,” said the London Independent. Though she never broke through to the front ranks of stardom, she could handle a wide variety of roles. She won praise for her sensitive portrayal of a blind girl who befriends a disfigured Peter Lorre in The Face Behind the Mask (1941). That same year, in Here Comes Mr. Jordan, “she gave a beguiling performance as the girl who falls in love with a boxer who has been reincarnated as a businessman.” Other notable performances were as “a young bride facing tragedy in the frozen north” in Mrs. Mike (1950) and as Tom Ewell’s wife in The Seven Year Itch (1955).

Keyes was just as well known for her off-screen life, said The Washington Post. She was married four times—to businessman Barton Bainbridge, directors Charles Vidor and John Huston, and finally to bandleader Artie Shaw. “Those weren’t marriages,” she reflected. “They were legalized love affairs so we wouldn’t have the big stink: ‘Oh my God, they’re living together!’ So what do you do? You get married.” All her unions ended with varying degrees of bitterness; after she upbraided Huston for buying a chimpanzee and told him, “One of us has to go—it’s the monkey or me,” Huston replied, “Honey, it’s you.” During and between marriages, Keyes reportedly had affairs with a variety of leading men, including Anthony Quinn and Kirk Douglas, as well as with billionaire Howard Hughes. “I always took up with the man of the moment,” she said, “and there were many such moments.”

Keyes, who died of uterine cancer, is survived by the son she adopted with John Huston.