During her Hollywood heyday in the 1950s Gloria Grahame created a gallery of vivid, eccentric characters that established her as an audience favorite and one of the most memorable actresses of the decade, especially in film noir roles. Since her death in 1981, her up-and-down career has become the stuff of legend and is immortalized in the current film Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool, starring Annette Bening as Grahame.

On this special evening on TCM, the esteemed Bening will join host Eddie Muller (the San Francisco writer known as "The Czar of Noir") in introducing two films featuring Grahame at the peak of her powers, In a Lonely Place(1950) and The Bad and the Beautiful (1952). 

Bening--an actress whose electric screen presence is a match for Grahame's--has received glowing reviews for Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool. Stephen Farber wrote in The Hollywood Reporter that Bening "captures the spirit of the complicated actress with remarkable subtlety and flair." Directed by Paul McGuigan, the film is based on a memoir by Peter Turner, a British actor who befriended Grahame in England near the end of her life and entered in to a May-December love affair with her. Turner is played by Jaime Bell, all grown up from Billy Elliott and also receiving critical acclaim for his performance. 

Bening confirms to Muller that she was introduced to the onscreen Gloria Grahame by director Stephen Frears when they working on the 1990 film The Grifters and he suggested that she watch the actress's movies to provide inspiration for her character. One of the things she noticed about the other actress was that "She was a great listener...always keen and observant and listening carefully to the other actors."