Old Hollywood’s Scandalous Child Actress

Hollywood is filled with stories of child actors who grew up too fast, but Tuesday Weld might just be the ultimate one. Weld’s penchant for scandal made people uncomfortable, but she still managed to become a star in her own right. Before that day, however, she was a verifiable hot mess. Let’s sink our teeth into her story and see what turned Tuesday Weld into an unlikely Hollywood survivor. At a shocking age, Tuesday Weld was infamous for her risque films and love life, but the villain was her own mother. Weld’s hatred for her mom festered until she finally lashed out and did the unthinkable. Stay tuned for more on that later. Actress Tuesday Weld was born Susan Kerweld, and it was not, as you might expect, on a Tuesday. It was Friday, August 27th, 1943. Weld’s family lived a precarious existence, one that could tumble at any moment. Just before she turned four, Susan Weld faced her very first crisis. Her small family became even smaller. Weld’s father, Lethrop Mley Weld, was the black sheep of the family. He had some serious baggage. Addiction and a scandalous romantic history. Lethrop passed suddenly and left them in a terrible financial position. Weld’s mother, Yosine Balforker, had her hands full with three kids and no source of income. What could she do? It was in this desperate moment that Yosine noticed something about her daughter, Susan, that gave her an idea.

Susan was remarkably pretty, and Yosine had a brilliant idea that would solve her small family’s financial dilemma. Yosine was desperate for money, so she tried to find work for young Susan as a model. Weld’s young life soon became filled with countless auditions. To make matters worse, she had the added pressure of earning money for food as well as supporting her mother emotionally. You’ll see expected Weld to fix all the problems in her life. All of this happened before Weld was even 10, and the consequences were chilling. At 9 years old, the pressures of being a replacement father to a family of four were too much for Weld, and she had a nervous breakdown. Elsene took the opportunity to move the family to Fort Lauderdale where Weld could finally attend school more regularly away from all the auditions back in New York City. Sadly, it was too late for Susan Weld to have a normal childhood. Weld had very grown-up problems, so she turned to a very grown-up solution. Booze. By 10, she already had a pretty serious addiction. However, the pressures of providing for a family still remained. So, Weld had to start working again. This time, her mother left the other kids with a friend in Fort Lauderdale and took Weld back to the Big Apple. It was time to make much needed money. Weld’s modeling soon led to something else, acting roles.

When she was just 12 years old, she got in front of a camera and a small role in a television series. That same year, 1956, the big screen came calling and the director was a big deal in more ways than one. Alfred Hitchcock gave Weld a small role as a giggling adolescent in his film The Wrong Man. But appearing in a film was no fairy tale. For Weld, it was closer to a nightmare. After her one stint on TV and one on film, Weld still had serious emotional problems. Maybe she wasn’t cut out for acting. or maybe she wasn’t cut out for being the sole earner for a family of five. These pressures eventually led Weld down a dangerous path, adding pills to her booze addiction. Weld’s mother refused to get her the help she needed. Instead, she continued to push her daughter into the spotlight against her will. Weld’s first lead role was in Rock Rock, called a jukebox musical because the songs in it were already hit singles of the time. While Weld was certainly the lead, the film’s real draw was the list of already established singers working on the film. Still, Weld stood out and for a scandalous reason. While there were plenty of young actors playing teenage roles, critics noticed something unique about Weld. She portrayed them as unwholesome. This led one critic from Time magazine to call her the archetypal nymphett. It seems that Weld’s inappropriate childhood was coming out in her characters, and sadly she was receiving recognition for that. While Hollywood is still famous for hiring adults to play teenagers, when it came to Weld, the opposite was true. Weld must have looked older than she was because she was still just 12 when they started filming Rock Rock. She was supposed to be a teenager. But that wasn’t the most disturbing part. The actor playing her on-screen boyfriend was actually a 21-year-old man. And we’ll see. Weld’s taste in men only mirrored the cringe-worthy roles she had to play. Weld’s next feature led her and her mother out to Hollywood for the production of 1958’s Rally Round the Flag Boys. This comedy had Weld playing the oddly named Teenage Nymphett, Comfort Good Pasture.

It was however co-stars that made the film important for Weld. She played opposite husband and wife Dream Team Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. However, it was Weld’s performance alongside Dwayne Hickman that gave 20th Century Fox a money-making idea. In 1959, they put the two together in a CBS TV show called The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. Weld, now officially using Tuesday as her name, played one of the loves that Gillis couldn’t have. There was, however, something else keeping these two teen stars apart. It turned out that Tuesday Weld and her co-star Hickman were not at all fond of each other. Hickman didn’t think Weld took acting seriously and didn’t come to rehearsals prepared. Weld, on the other hand, found Hickman to be too into himself and out of touch with the real world. Besides this, there was another reason why the show wasn’t working for Weld. The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis was a family show and Weld, well, Weld was being herself. In one scene, she was flirting with a classmate played by Warren Beatty where Beatty is simply describing the clothes in his closet. Both Beatty and Weld pushed the scene to an inappropriate climax that the sponsor of the show was not comfortable with. The producers dropped Weld after one season. But there were bigger things in store for the fired actress. Allied Artists took Weld from 20th Century Fox as well as something else far more precious, her innocence. For most of her career, she played teenagers in love, but now she was appearing in Sex Kittens Go to College. The 1960 film, whose dubious claim to fame was the appearance of Brigitte Bardot’s sister, might just be one of the worst movies ever made. There was, however, something else that brought notoriety to the film, something even more scandalous than the title. To make as much money as possible, Allied Artists decided to do something radical. They shot some naughty footage with some dancers and a robot and added it to the film. They then released the film in theaters that catered to a more adult audience. Weld was only 17 years old, starring in an X-rated movie, but then she took it a step further. Her next film was even more risque. The Private Lives of Adam and Eve came out a year later, but Weld had made it a year earlier when she was just 16. The film follows a group of bus travelers as they all share a dream that they are back in the biblical Garden of Eden. The film starred the curvaceous Mamie Van Doren and unsurprisingly boasted B-movie status.

This one, however, was different as it enraged a particular group of people. It was the 1960s and moviegoers were used to a little titillation at the theater. The Private Lives of Adam and Eve, however, pushed the envelope a little further by including a biblical reference. The Catholic Legion of Decency called the film blasphemous and sacrilegious. In the UK, the movie didn’t even receive a cinema certificate. It was official. Tuesday Weld was a bad girl who had no problems making unwholesome movies. It wasn’t just the movies that gave Tuesday Weld a bad reputation. You see, the actress’s dating rampage didn’t help matters, especially when her lovers were so much older than her. Some of her legendary conquests included Frank Sinatra, Raymond Burr, and George Hamilton. When she was just 16 years old, she dated Spartacus actor John Ireland, who was 45 at the time. The actress unabashedly flaunted her older boyfriends and her love of excess. She even appeared at interviews barefoot. Remember, this was a young woman in her teenage years, and this is the early 1960s. Weld was ahead of her time, and in her mind, there was nowhere to go but up. 1961 saw Tuesday Weld in Return to Peyton Place. While this was a higher class of film than her previous ones, it again dealt with taboo subjects. Weld played Selena Cross, a young woman whose stepfather forced her into inappropriate relations. Weld was still fairly unknown as an actor, but her talent shone through in this film. TV Guide noted that Weld had a natural appeal, one that was rather carnal in nature. In 1961, Weld appeared in Wild in the Country with Elvis Presley. It turned out that the set of the film was also wild as Elvis had ignited the amorous interest of two of his co-stars. Both Hope Lange and Tuesday Weld batted their eyelashes at Presley. But Weld won out, mostly because Lange already had a husband and was unavailable for a relationship. With Lange out of the way, Weld was free to make her move. But that’s when Weld’s bad girl reputation reared its ugly head. Elvis’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, had rigid control over Presley’s career. When the colonel heard that his number one client was courting Hollywood badgirl Weld, he put a stop to it immediately. All those Weld pictures with racy titles and her numerous boyfriends had given her a bad rep, and even Elvis with his gyrating hips wasn’t allowed to go there. Sometimes, however, a bad rep can get you a great offer. In 1962, Stanley Kubrick was casting his film version of the novel Lolita. The story about a relationship between a middle-aged man and a 14-year-old girl was already more than icky in book form. But on the screen, for some reason, Kubrick immediately thought of Weld for the title role. Go figure. Weld’s response to the offer said a lot about her real life. In turning him down, she said, “I didn’t have to play it. I was Lolita.

” The story of Lolita certainly seemed to fit Weld’s love of controversy in film. While her rejection of the role seemed cavalier, it was perhaps a huge mistake. The film went on to get rave reviews and multiple award nominations. The woman who took the role, Sue Lyon, won a Golden Globe for her performance. Weld, meanwhile, continued to struggle, failing to find the right films. So, she did something surprisingly practical. She took a break. Weld didn’t like the roles producers were offering her, so she took a hiatus from acting, but she didn’t exactly choose the most relaxing getaway to facilitate her moment of self-reckoning. Instead, she decided on the bustling Greenwich Village in Manhattan. As flaky as this may sound, something happened in the village because Weld emerged as a changed woman. After her soul-searching effort in Greenwich Village, Weld actually became quite successful. In 1965, she appeared opposite Steve McQueen in the hit film The Cincinnati Kid. Next, Weld got serious and took a role in a TV version of The Crucible, playing opposite George C. Scott, and her performance garnered her a good dollop of praise. Whatever happened to Weld during her hiatus somehow helped her move away from always playing the libidinous teen. What’s more, her personal life mirrored this change. Around the same age, Weld got serious about her relationships as well. In 1965, she married screenwriter Claude Harz, and the two had a child named Natasha. It seemed like a perfect time for Weld to settle down. Sadly, it didn’t last. By 1971, they’d divorced, and the actress put the blame squarely on her mother’s shoulders. Weld said that Yosine hated all the men she’d been with, including her husband. And speaking of hating men, Weld’s next film had her battling it out with her director. One of Weld’s next feature films was 1968’s Pretty Poison. This black comedy, which later became a cult hit, gave Weld a heap of trouble.

In spite of her crazy off-screen lifestyle, Weld was actually known as being quite professional on set. Not so with Pretty Poison. Weld did not get on with director Noel Black and there was a put up your dukes and fight situation right from the get-go. The director of Pretty Poison was brand new at the job and not prepared to deal with someone like Weld. Yes, he was an amateur, but it didn’t excuse his lousy acting notes. His direction for Weld for one scene was to think about Coca-Cola. Faced with his brutal direction, she became increasingly neurotic. Weld eventually told Black to speak to her co-star Anthony Perkins so that he could interpret the directions for her. Weld later went on to say that it was her worst performance on film. The project, however, might have been doomed from the very beginning. Pretty Poison actually got quite good reviews and did eventually achieve cult status. There is, however, a good reason why it failed at the box office. The release date of this comedy about two brutal young people on a rampage in America was right around the time that there were two horrible American tragedies. The murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. America was simply not in the mood for this kind of parody. And do you know what Weld wasn’t in the mood for? Roman Polanski. Yosine’s daughter was not afraid to say no when she thought a part wasn’t right. In 1971, Roman Polanski offered her a role in his version of Macbeth where she had to sleepwalk wearing nothing at all. Weld very matter-of-factly told Polanski where he could shove his offer. Maybe Weld had a sixth sense about Polanski because six years later he was on the run from the law for mistreating a 13-year-old girl. Phew, close call. In 1972, Weld had a starring role in Play It As It Lays. Here she got to star beside her friend Anthony Perkins for the second time. Some call this role one of Weld’s best and I would say it’s because she played a character that hit close to home. In the film, she plays Maria, an ex-model turned B-movie actor who is unhappily separated from her husband. Unsurprisingly, she nailed it.

The people at the Golden Globes agreed and gave her a nomination for best actress. 1977 saw Weld team up with Diane Keaton in Looking for Mr. Goodbar. That same year, Keaton had made Annie Hall, which won her a Golden Globe and an Oscar. So, it was a good match for Weld. It was Weld, however, who found the greater success in this film. She got the nod from the Academy for the supporting actress role. But that wasn’t all. Due to the role, she also began dating ultra-handsome Richard Gere. Coincidentally, Weld and Keaton would soon cross paths again when they both dated Al Pacino. Between all the amazing dates she had, Weld also managed to marry two more men. In 1975, Weld married the bumbling comedic actor Dudley Moore and they had a son together. This marriage ended in divorce in 1980, but another marriage followed soon after. In 1985, she hooked up and married a violinist and conductor named Pinchas Zukerman. This marriage, however, seemed like trouble from the start and for a very scary reason. In 1988, Norman Kean, a Broadway producer, took a blade to his wife and then jumped off the roof of his apartment. Neither Kean nor his wife survived the harrowing ordeal, which meant their home in Montauk went up for sale. Weld and Zukerman were house hunting at the time and seemed to have no qualms about living in the home of this obviously deranged man. Without a second thought, they bought the house and moved right in. After the unlucky 13th year of marriage, Weld and Zukerman decided to call it quits. Weld reportedly said that she didn’t want to hear another note of his music, which made living with a musician kind of difficult. What was more difficult, however, was selling their allegedly haunted home. Even 20 years after the horrific incident, buyers were still wary of buying a house linked to such infamy. In 2009, Weld finally sold it for about $2 million under asking.

The actress had more or less solved her housing problem. Now, it was time for her reputation to take another nose dive. Weld and her mother had a rather horrible relationship and it led Weld to do something awful. She told people her mother was no longer alive. It’s a pretty nasty thing to do, but Yosine eventually got her revenge. Mom got her story told in a book, and the title was probably the best thing about it. She called it, “If it’s Tuesday, I must be dead.” In the book, Yosine gets to blame all her troubles on Weld. Some even gave it the nickname Daughter Dearest, comparing it to Mommy Dearest by Joan Crawford’s daughter. Incidentally, Yosine passed in 2001, two years before the book’s release. The passing of Yosine was a difficult time for Weld, and she seemed very conflicted about it. While she said that without her mom around, she finally felt free, she also said that her passing meant very little to her. Creepier still, Weld insists that she continues to feel Yosine’s presence in her life. She even entertains the idea that she could be reincarnated. Her mother had been a dominating force her entire life. What would Weld do now that Yosine was gone? For exclusive perks like early access to new videos, priority replies to your comments, and to have your say on future content, consider becoming a Factism member. On top of that, your support helps keep the channel going. Click the link in the description for more details. Just before her mother’s passing in 2001, Weld said so long to Hollywood and movies and moved to Colorado.

It seemed Weld was in search of some peace and quiet, expressing a hunger for silence. Still, dark rumors swirl around her. Some wonder if Weld has bipolar disorder. Others have said she dabbles in the occult. This is all speculation, but we do know one thing. 17 years after moving to find peace and quiet, she moved back to Hollywood. Maybe we’ll see her in the movies one more time. Even if she never makes another film, Weld’s talent and allure will stay with us. Her name has been referenced in such diverse TV shows as The Flintstones, American Horror Story, and Two and a Half Men. Her face even appeared on the 1999 cover of the Matthew Sweet album Girlfriend. Two other bands went a little further and actually took her name for theirs. British band, The Real Tuesday Weld, and a German band simply called Tuesday Weld. Weld says she appreciates her cult status, calling it a very nice thing. If you enjoyed this Factism video, give it a thumbs up and subscribe for more incredible stories. Want to stay tuned in who we cover next? Join our membership program through the link in the description for exclusive perks. Your support means everything to us. Thanks for watching and we’ll see you on the next.