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Jane Russell: 1921-2011


JaneRussell-blog.jpgActress Jane Russell died Feb. 28 at the age of 89. She was a sultry sex symbol in the 1940s and ’50s, steaming up the screen in 1943’s The Outlaw and holding her own against Marilyn Monroe in 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (pictured). She also was one of the entertainment industry’s most prominent Christians.

Plugged In wasn’t around when The Outlaw premiered, but if we were, we would’ve had a lot to say about it. Made when the entertainment industry was under the sway of the Hays Code (which stipulated films had to be morally uplifting and, mostly, family friendly), The Outlaw was more scandalous in its day than Blue Valentine or Brüno are in ours—an outrageous display (for the time) of sex and skin that scandalized much of middle America. The stars of the show weren’t so much Russell and Jack Buetel (who received top billing), but rather Russell’s breasts—prominently displayed in every poster and promotion at the time. Howard Hughes, the man behind the film, allegedly designed a special bra for Russell to use in the movie (though, according to The New York Times, Russell never wore it).

The Outlaw was slapped down by the Hays Code, and even when Hughes edited out about 30 seconds of the film, censors still weren’t satisfied. The film, finished in 1941, wasn’t released until two years later, and then ran just a handful of weeks in San Francisco before it was pulled again. According to the Times, The Outlaw wasn’t released in New York City until 1947 and didn’t screen in much of the nation until 1950. Even then, several communities banned the flick altogether.

Which makes Russell’s involvement with the project all the more interesting.

According to an interview Russell conducted with Christianity Today, Russell “gave my heart to the Lord” when she was just 5 years old, and that she and her brothers listened to her mother read the Bible every day when she was a child. She says she helped start something called the Hollywood Christian Group in the early 1940s, essentially a Bible study well-attended by many of the day’s movie stars, including Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. Marilyn Monroe says that Russell tried to convert her to Christianity, while she tried to “introduce her to Freud.”

In her later years, she became an outspoken opponent of abortion and founded the World Adoption International Agency, which according to London’s Daily Mail, has helped 40,000 children through adoption.

She told Christianity Today that her work in adoption was spurred on, in part, by the fact that she was unable to have any children of her own—the result of a back-alley abortion she underwent before she was married in 1943. “Mom would say things like, ‘There’s a path the Lord wants you to go on, and if you fall off, He will rub your nose in it, and then you’ll know what’s wrong with that situation, and He’ll try to help fix it,'” Russell told CT. “And she said that’s the way all the charities have gotten started; it’s always somebody has had their nose rubbed in that problem.”

It’s fitting, I suppose, that Russell’s autobiography was titled My Path and My Detours—a title that, in many ways, could be used for each of our life stories as well. Married three times and divorced once, Russell struggled with alcoholism for decades; she was arrested in 1978 for driving drunk, and her children, according to the Times, made her go to rehab just 10 years ago, when she was 79. But though her life wasn’t perfect and her decisions weren’t always the best, she never stopped believing: For her, she says in her book, God was always there.

“Without faith, I never would have made it,” Russell said (according to the Mail) after her third husband died. “I don’t know how people can survive all the disasters in their lives if they don’t have any faith, if they don’t know the Lord loves them and cares about them and has another plan.”

Russell wasn’t a perfect Christian. None of us are, of course. And for me, her life reminds me that we’re brought to faith not in spite of our faults and failings, but because of them.