From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Terry Moore (born Helen Luella Koford) (born January 7, 1929) is an American actress.

Early life

Born January 7, 1929, in Glendale, California, as Helen Luella Koford, Moore grew up in a Mormon family in Los Angeles, California. She worked as a child model before making her film debut in Maryland (1940). Moore was billed as Judy Ford, Jan Ford, and January Ford before taking Terry Moore as her name in 1948.

Career

Moore worked in radio in the 1940s, most memorably as Bumps Smith on The Smiths of Hollywood. Most of her films were B-pictures, but several were box office hits, including Mighty Joe Young (1949), Come Back, Little Sheba (1952) - for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and Peyton Place (1957).

In 1962 she appeared as a rancher's daughter in the NBC Western drama Empire, opposite Richard Egan and Ryan O'Neal. Moore has worked steadily throughout her career, usually in minor roles in small films. She appeared on the NBC interview program Here's Hollywood.

Personal life

Moore lived with Howard Hughes briefly in a small duplex or cabin at his Tule Springs Ranch near Las Vegas, Nevada. After he died, Moore claimed that they married secretly in 1949, and never divorced. She failed to provide any evidence of a marriage, but the Hughes's estate paid her a settlement in 1984.

Moore wrote two books about Hughes:

• Terry Moore - The Beauty and the Billionaire, New York (1984).
• Terry Moore and Jerry Rivers - The Passions of Howard Hughes. General Publishing Group (1996), an abridged audio version of the book narrated by Terry. She claims that Hughes was denied medical treatment by people conspiring to take over his estate.

She married an American football player, Glenn Davis, in 1951.

Moore gave birth to a son, actor Grant Cramer.

At age 55, Moore posed nude in the August 1984 issue of Playboy magazine, photographed by Ken Marcus. She told Jeff Benziger of Autograph Collector Magazine in a 2003 interview that her nude pictorial was a "revenge thing" against those who think women are washed up at 30. "In Hollywood, they think you're only good from 18 to 25 -- that's a woman's years. A man goes on forever. I'd see the girls with the false breasts, and the nose jobs, and the things put in the cheeks, and everything. And I thought, 'I'm all natural. I thought, I'll show them'. And my photos were unretouched." She refused to pose nude again at age 65, saying that she had proven her point.

Despite appearing naked in Playboy, Moore describes herself as a "devout Mormon".

Filmography

Television Appearances

• What's My Line? (1955) (as a mystery celebrity guest)
• The Name's The Same (1955) (celebrity guest)

External links

• Official site for Terry Moore
• Terry Moore at the Internet Movie Database
• Old Skool with Terry and Gita on Star!