Golden-age Hollywood stars (and their pet lions) – in pictures

From Marilyn Monroe getting her hair done to a bird-balancing Alfred Hitchcock, these images from the Life magazine archive exude glamour and intrigue

Marilyn Monroe and Sydney Guilaroff, Let’s Make Love, MGM Studios, 1960

The golden age of the world’s most popular weekly photography magazine (1936-1972) coincided with Hollywood’s most glamorous decades. Featuring hundreds of meticulously researched and curated images from the vast Life archive, a new book captures ‘more stars than there are in heaven’, including location shoots, Oscar nights, homes and alluring parties. This image shows the team beautifying Monroe for a scene in her penultimate film, Let’s Make Love. LIFE. Hollywood is available via Taschen

Photograph: John Bryson/Getty Images

Gregory Peck, To Kill a Mockingbird, Hollywood, 1956

Gregory Peck came to represent all that was most noble on screen, best exemplified by his landmark performance as southern lawyer Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. Off screen, Peck was a sharp businessman who, Life wrote: ‘receives 10% of the gross for appearing in other people’s films … and will soon start making his own. He has formed his own company, bought scripts and will star himself.’ Among Peck’s own productions was William Wyler’s western The Big Country

Photograph: Allan Grant/TI Gotham, Inc/Life Picture Collection, Meredith Operations Corporation

Sidney Poitier and Juanita Hardy, A Raisin in the Sun, New York, 1959

Sidney Poitier and Juanita Hardy, his first wife, relax at their home in Mount Vernon, New York. Throughout much of his career he brought a quiet, thoughtful presence to his performances, like Detective Virgil Tibbs in In the Heat of the Night. ‘Poitier has many acting gifts,’ Life observed, ‘but perhaps his finest is an appearance, an aura, of unspoiled natural virtue’

Photograph: Gordon Parks/TI Gotham, Inc/Life Picture Collection, Meredith Operations Corporation

Tippi Hedren and Neil the Lion, California, 1971

American actor and animal activist Tippi Hedren sunbathes at home with her pet lion Neil. This was taken several years before production began on her calamitous film, Roar. She and her husband, agent Noel Marshall, built the movie around more than 100 untrained lions, tigers and other animals, filming it primarily in and around their Los Angeles home. Seventy cast and crew members were injured during production, including Hedren’s daughter, Melanie Griffith, whose wounds required plastic surgery. Hedren herself was badly hurt by an elephant

Photograph: Michael Rougier/TI Gotham, Inc/Life Picture Collection, Meredith Operations Corporation

Alfred Hitchcock, The Birds, Universal Studios, 1963

The iconic director posing with the avian stars from his classic horror movie The Birds. Over 25,000 live ones were used during filming, and it was rumoured that the birds were given wheat mixed with whiskey to make them more docile

Photograph: Philippe Halsman / Magnum Photos / Agentur Focus

Jayne Mansfield Takes a Bubble Bath, Los Angeles, 1960

American actor Jayne Mansfield and her husband, former Mr Universe Mickey Hargitay, had stage designer Glen Holse transform their Hollywood mansion into a ‘Pink Palace’. Pink paint and shag carpets abounded, even on the bathroom walls. In the 1961 essay A Daffy Tinge Binge, Life quipped: ‘You can’t tell the floor from the ceiling in Jayne Mansfield’s furry pink bathroom. The main difference is that the heart-shaped bathtub is on the floor’

Photograph: Allan Grant/TI Gotham, Inc/Life Picture Collection, Meredith Operations Corporation

Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis’ Family, Beverly Hills, 1959

Tony Curtis had a contract with Universal Studios when he announced his engagement to Janet Leigh. Universal was furious, feeling marriage would spoil his bachelor image and alienate his devoted fans. ‘But,’ Life explained, ‘despite bitter recriminations, threats of banishment back to the Bronx and warnings that his movie career would be kaput, Tony and Janet eloped.’ Their stardom remained undimmed, and they subsequently had two daughters, Kelly (left) and Jamie Lee (right), who both became actors

Photograph: Allan Grant/TI Gotham, Inc/Life Picture Collection, Meredith Operations Corporation

Sophia Loren and Carlo Ponti, Rome, 1964

Sophia Loren and husband Carlo Ponti lying across a bed together. Life detailed Loren and Ponti’s winding road to matrimony in a previous article entitled Bigamy Italian Style. Ponti attempted to divorce his first wife and marry Loren by proxy in Mexico, but Italy didn’t recognise divorce. Italian courts accused Ponti of bigamy, and Loren and Ponti had their marriage annulled. In 1966, they attained citizenship in France and were finally married there

Photograph: Alfred Eisenstaedt/TI Gotham, Inc. © Life Picture Collection, Meredith Operations Corporation

Marlene Dietrich, Germany, 1945

In a delicious bit of irony, Marlene Dietrich, a German émigré, was one of the most beloved entertainers of American soldiers during the second world war. Her daughter, Maria Riva, explained in her later book on her mother ‘the reason for her great following’ among servicemen was that ‘they knew that she was not phoney, that she was really there for them, and that she was ready to be with them in the mud’

Photograph: George Silk/TI Gotham, Inc/Life Picture Collection, Meredith Operations Corporation

Department by department, The Razor’s Edge, 1946

Life magazine clearly delineates a typical major studio movie crew. During Hollywood’s studio system, each of the ‘majors’ – Fox, Warner Bros, etc – ran like a well-oiled machine. A film’s creative team was composed of seasoned veterans, some of whom honed their craft in a single studio’s employ for decades. Life noted that it is ‘also necessary to have many experts standing ready to ply their trades at a moment’s notice should anything go wrong on sets whose inflexible overhead, active or idle, is some $2,000 an hour’

Photograph: Ralph Crane/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bathing beauties, MGM Studios, 1944

The stage set for the motion picture Bathing Beauties during filming. A camera is mounted high on a platform overlooking synchronised swimmers in one of Esther Williams’s (known as ‘America’s mermaid’) trademark ‘aqua ballets’. The sequence was touted in the film’s trailer as the ‘most dazzling colour spectacle ever filmed!’

Photograph: Ralph Crane/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Charlton Heston, The Ten Commandments, 1958

The first American drive-in cinema opened in 1933; by 1951, 3,580 were in operation. Drive-ins played major hits like this one, but became primarily associated with cheaper, more lurid fare. In 1951, Life elaborated on their amenities: ‘It offers entertainment for the whole family in cosy quarters. In addition, it sometimes provides carhop service, washing machines, even beauty parlours, and is somewhat more likely than TV to provide a show worth looking at’

Photograph: JR Eyerman/TI Gotham, Inc/Life Picture Collection, Meredith Operations Corporation