#nudity on film

In 1915, Audrey Munson became the first person to appear fully nude in a mainstream Hollywood movie.

Her body was already famous: as a model, she had posed for most of the famous sculptors of the era. You can see her likeness in the lobby of the Hotel Astor and on top of the Wisconsin State Capitol dome. At the Longfellow Memorial, she is Evangeline.

This new thing of nudity on film created a dilemma for the censors. If they decided Munson’s body was obscene, the popular public art based on her figure would also have to be suppressed. A compromise solved the problem of the slippery slope: Munson would always play an artist’s model, thereby limiting any association between nudity and sexuality.

Munson starred in four films, but only one, Purity, survives. In 1993, a copy was discovered locked up in a vault in France.

She actually used a body double–of sorts. Though Munson performed all the nude scenes, a lookalike actress named Jane Thomas stepped in on those occasions when the character wore clothes.

Munson preferred not to cover up when given the choice. She wrote: “Clothes ruined us. They do harm to our bodies and worse to our souls. So few young women of today know what to do with their hands, how to carry them and how to use them in company because their clothes are in the way.”

To an interviewer, she said, “No woman who is conscious of clothing is truly feminine or truly beautiful.” That went for makeup as well, though beauty’s greatest foe, she proclaimed in a column written for the New York American, was the garter belt.

Her life was long but not happy. Scandal broke in 1919 when her landlord killed his wife, allegedly to make himself eligible to marry Munson. She fled to Canada and though police eventually determined she was not an accessory to the crime, moralists perpetuated the scandal by feeding gossip to the tabloids. (Perhaps the garter belt lobby secretly funded their efforts.)

Her reputation ruined, Munson could not find work as an actress or a model. Depressed and impoverished, she drank bichloride of mercury, surviving the suicide attempt but likely damaging her brain. She was institutionalized in a psychiatric facility, where she remained until her death, in 1996, at the age of 104.

(Additional source: The Believer)