Jane Greer

Jane Greer (September 9, 1924 – August 24, 2001) was an American film and television actress who was perhaps best known for her role as femme fatale Kathie Moffat in the 1947 film noir Out of the Past.

Early years

The five-foot five Greer began life as Bettejane Greer in Washington, D.C., the daughter of Charles Durell McClellan Greer, Jr., and his wife, Bettie. In 1940, at age 15, Greer suffered from a facial palsy, which paralyzed the left side of her face. She recovered, but it has been speculated that the condition contributed to her "patented look" and "a calm, quizzical gaze and an enigmatic expression that would later lead RKO to promote her as 'the woman with the Mona Lisa smile'." She claimed that the facial exercises used to overcome the paralysis taught her how to convey human emotion.

On December 4, 1945, Greer had her name legally changed to Jane Greer by a court in Los Angeles. She said of her previous name: "Mine is a sissy name. It's too bo-peepish, ingenueish, for the type of role I've been playing. It's like Mary Lou or Mary Ann."

Jane Greer (poet)

Jane Greer (born May 25, 1953) is an American poet. In 1981 she founded Plains Poetry Journal, a literary magazine that was an advance guard of the New Formalism movement. In her "Editorial Manifesto," Greer wrote: "Through history, the best poetry has used certain conventions: meter, rhyme, alliteration, assonance, painstaking attention to diction. Not all good poems use all of these conventions, but if a poem uses none of them, why call it a poem?" She decried the sort of conversational free verse "that reads like random thoughts randomly written," and wrote, "All these attempts at unfettered individuality sound alike." Greer edited Plains Poetry Journal until 1993. In 1984, Writer's Digest named Plains Poetry Journal the "#1 Non-paying U.S. Poetry Magazine."

Greer's poems have appeared in the anthologies A Formal Feeling Comes, edited by Annie Finch, and A Garland for Harry Duncan, edited by W. Thomas Taylor, and in many journals, including Yale Literary Magazine, First Things, America, and Chronicles. For Chronicles she also wrote the monthly “Letters from the Heartland” column. Her ideas about poetics and esthetics are further elaborated in a short essay, "Art Is Made," in A Formal Feeling Comes.