Women We Love: Norma Shearer

Object of our affection: Norma Shearer, actress.

- She is credited as "the first American film actress to make it chic and acceptable to be single and not a virgin on screen".

- She won the third ever Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in The Divorcée and was nominated another five times (Their Own Desire, A Free Soul, The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Romeo and Juliet and Marie Antoinette).

- Married for nine years to "boy wonder" film producer Irving Thalberg, twenty-five years her junior; he was head of production at Metro Goldwyn Meyer, thus she was known as "The First Lady of MGM". After Thalberg's death in 1936, her interest in her career wavered; she would pass on the lead roles in such future classics as Gone With the Wind, Mrs. Miniver and Now, Voyager.

- Life imitates art: infamously feuded with co-star Joan Crawford during the filming of George Cukor's The Women, her last great role.

- Two of Norma Shearer's early pre-code classics, The Divorcée and A Free Soul, will be released on DVD for the first time on March 25 as part of the TCM Archives - Forbidden Hollywood Collection, Volume 2,now available for pre-order from Amazon.com.