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FRANCES
FARMER 1914�1970
The story of actress Frances Farmer�s life was portrayed by Jessica Lange in
the 1982 movie �Frances.� It is a story of the savage, brutal and unforgivable
destruction brought upon one of the most talented actresses of her time by psychiatrists.
Farmer was a beautiful screen and stage actress whose career lit up Hollywood
and Broadway in the 1930s and 1940s. By age 27, she had appeared in 18 films,
three Broadway plays and 30 major radio shows. She was compared to the great
Greta Garbo.
Upset over a string of failed relationships and stressed by career demands,
she was also addicted to amphetamines prescribed to keep her weight under control.
Farmer was committed to a psychiatric institution in 1943. It was the ruin of
her career as she spent the next seven years in mental institutions and was
forced to undergo brutal and unworkable electroshock and drugs. She was also
subjected to 90 insulin shocks. When she tried to escape, psychiatrists punitively
administered more ECT in an effort to break her defiant and rebellious will.
When this failed to turn her into a �model� patient, she was given �hydrotherapy��stripped
naked and thrown into a tub of icy water for six to eight hours. Unable to muster
any resistance due to her drug-induced stupor, she was raped by orderlies and
rented out as a sex toy for local soldiers: �One of the most vivid recollections
of some veterans of the institution would be the sight of Frances Farmer being
held down by orderlies and raped by drunken soldiers.�
Farmer�s last �treatment� was at the hands of Walter J. Freeman, psychiatry�s
czar of lobotomy. Frances Farmer never regained her abilities. She realized
that the psychiatrists had been �systematically destroying the only thing she
had ever been able to hold onto in life�her faith in her artistic creativity.�
She died at the age of 57, destitute and her spirit broken.
�Never console yourself into believing that the terror has passed, for it
looms as large and as evil today as it did in the despicable era of Bedlam.
But I must relate the horrors as I recall them, in the hope that some force
for mankind might be moved to relieve forever the unfortunate creatures who
are still imprisoned in the back wards of decaying institutions.�
� Frances Farmer
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