Born Gloria May Josephine Svensson in Chigago, IL; an Army brat, she went to public schools in Chicago, Key West, FL, and San Juan, PR. Imperious (at 4' 11-1/2") silent screen legend and epitome of early Hollywood glamour who began her career at Chicago's Essanay Studios in 1913. Swanson married Wallace Beery, another Essanay performer, in 1916, and the pair moved to Hollywood. After appearing in a series of Mack Sennett's romantic comedies at Triangle, Swanson moved to Paramount, back to Triangle, and then back again to Paramount, where she reached stardom in the snappy, sophisticated bedroom farces of C.B. De Mille. In all, she made almost 60 silent films. By the mid-20s Swanson was at the peak of her popularity. In 1927, with financial assistance from investor and lover Joseph P. Kennedy, she began producing her own films; these included the two features for which she received her first Oscar nominations, SADIE THOMPSON (1928) and THE TRESPASSER (1929). Her company ran into massive fiscal problems, however, due to director Erich von Stroheim's extravagant QUEEN KELLY (1929). Other credits from this period include WHAT A WIDOW! (1930), INDISCREET and TONIGHT OR NEVER (both 1931). Swanson went to England for PERFECT UNDERSTANDING (1933), which met the fate of most British pictures with American audiences of the time: it flopped. Back in Hollywood, she made the Teutonic operetta MUSIC IN THE AIR (1934), with script by Billy Wilder and direction by Joe May, both refugees from the Third Reich. It, too, was given a tepid reception. Swanson was off the screen until 1941 when she made the enjoyable FATHER TAKES A WIFE with Adolphe Menjou at RKO. It did nothing to revive her screen career. Nor, for that matter, did SUNSET BLVD. (1950). Despite receiving a third Oscar nomination for the performance of a lifetime -- as Norma Desmond, a character too many people, especially in retrospect, are willing to believe was just like her -- there was no encore. THREE FOR BEDROOM C (1952) was a dog, NERO'S MISTRESS (1956) an Italian-French nonentity, AIRPORT '75 (1974) an all-star farrago in which she played herself. (She also starred in a campy telefilm, "Killer Bees" in 1974.) In the 1960s Swanson toured in a play called Reprise, and starred on Broadway in Butterflies Are Free in 1971, but her screen magic never really projected across the footlights. Her five husbands included Beery (1916-1919), Brown Derby restraunteur Herbert K. Somborn (1919-1922), Michael Farmer (1931-1934), William Davey (1945-1948) and screenwriter William Duffy (1976- her death in 1983). Swanson wrote her own autobiography (Swanson on Swanson, 1980) in rebuttal to certain claims made by Rose F. Kennedy in her 1974 memoirs.    Nominated for Actress 1927-8: SADIE THOMPSON    Nominated for Actress 1929-30: THE TRESPASSER    Nominated for Actress 1950: SUNSET BLVD. 3 nominations