Lewis Milestone’s film of Somerset Maugham’s Rain, she was, she insisted, “simply awful [in an] unpardonably bad performance … I was wrong every scene of the way.” This complete miscalculation of her achievement may well have been caused by the overwhelmingly negative fan mail Joan received about the movie: even her admirers were unable to see that the actress wearing tawdry clothes, portraying a woman of easy virtue who sneers at male hypocrisy, was not that woman in real life. The public’s negative reaction was a classic example of moviegoers rejecting a performer because they did not like
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