Want to know the best Gloria Swanson movies? How about the worst Gloria Swanson movies? Curious about Gloria Swanson box office grosses or which Gloria Swanson movie picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Gloria Swanson movie got the best reviews from critics and audiences? Well, you have come to the right place….because we have all of that information.
Gloria Swanson (1899-1993) was an Oscar® nominated American actress. Swanson was the silent screen’s most successful and highest-paid actress. She appeared in numerous early Cecil B. DeMille directed movies. In 1950, after an absence from the screen for several years, Swanson achieved widespread critical acclaim and recognition for her role as Norma Desmond, a reclusive silent film star, in the critically acclaimed 1950 film Sunset Boulevard. Her IMDb page shows 82 acting credits from 1914 to 1974. This page will rank Gloria Swanson movies from Best to Worst in six different sortable columns of information. Television shows, shorts and some of her early silent movies were not included in the rankings. To do well in our overall rankings a movie has to do well at the box office, get good reviews by critics, be liked by audiences and get some award recognition. This page was requested by UMR Hall of Famer, bob cox and Me (not Cogerson).
Gloria Swanson Movies Ranked In Chronological Order With Ultimate Movie Rankings Score (1 to 5 UMR Tickets) *Best combo of box office, reviews and awards.
Gloria Swanson Movies Can Be Ranked 6 Ways In This Table
The really cool thing about this table is that it is “user-sortable”. Rank the movies anyway you want.
- Sort Gloria Swanson movies by her co-stars
- Sort Gloria Swanson movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
- Sort Gloria Swanson movies by yearly domestic box office rank
- Sort Gloria Swanson movies by how they were received by critics and audiences. 60% rating or higher should indicate a good movie.
- Sort by how many Oscar® nominations and how many Oscar® wins each Gloria Swanson movie received.
- Sort Gloria Swanson movies by Ultimate Movie Rankings (UMR) Score. UMR puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.
Best IMDb Trivia On Gloria Swanson
1.Gloria May Josephine Swanson was born in Chicago, Illnois in 1899.
2. Gloria Swanson made her movie debut in 1914 as an extra in The Song of Soul. She moved to California in 1916 to appear in Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios comedies opposite Bobby Vernon. With their great screen chemistry, the pair became popular.
3. Gloria Swanson was the visual inspiration for the original illustrations of Morticia Addams in The Addams Family, when were published in The New Yorker in 1938. Swanson was 39 years old at the point.
4. Gloria Swanson’s performance as Norma Desmond in Sunset Blvd. (1950) is ranked #31 on Premiere Magazine’s 100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time.
5. Gloria Swanson was known for her extravagant lifestyle, it was reported that she earned $8,000,000 between 1918 and 1929 and spent nearly all of it. By the time of her death in 1983, her gross estate was valued at just over $1,440,000.
Check out Gloria Swanson’s career compared to current and classic actors. Most 100 Million Dollar Movies of All-Time.
Academy Award® and Oscar® are the registered trademarks of the Academy of Motion Arts and Sciences. Emmy® and Tony® are registered trademarks.
Added Steve’s Gloria Swanson YouTube Video to this page. Our thoughts originally found on his channel are now found below as well.
Good video. Surprised I was only two videos behind….as I have been so crazy busy the last month. Winter break could not get here fast enough. I have only seen two of her movies. #1 Sunset Blvd (classic movie that I need to re-watch soon) and #19 Airport 75. Voted up and shared at https://www.ultimatemovierankings.com/gloria-swanson-movies/. Merry Christmas.
Merry Christmas Bruce and the Cogerson clan! I’m currently taking an extended Xmas break from youtube videos, but I will be back eventually. Lets hope 2021 is better than this awful year.
Your tally 2 out of 25, I’ve seen 2 too (the same two) and Flora managed 3.
Thanks again for the comment, share and vote, much appreciated.
Hey Steve…I hope you are enjoying your extended YouTube break. I agree 100%….let’s hope 2021 is way better than 2020. Not a huge tally count for any of us…Flora 3, you and me 2. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you as well. Good to hear from you.
Classy set of vintage [consistently raunchy] stills/posters/lobby cards from Steve in Gloria Swanson video – 98.5% rated for my own satisfaction. BEST STILLS/LOBBY CARDS
1/Open classy 2
2/My American Wife
3/For Better for Worse
4/Perfect Understanding
5/solo one for 3 for Bedroom C
6/Zaza
7/Indiscreet
8/two for Music in the Air
9/1st one for Tonight or Never
10/Trespasser
11/Stage Struck
12/Manhandled
13/Don’t Change Your Husband – exceptionally suggestive!
14/Why Change Your Wife?
15/Beyond the Rocks
16/Male and Female
17/Sadie Thompson
18/Queen Kelly
19/all 3 for Sunset Boulevard
PERFORMANCE OF STEVE’s RECENT 4 SILENT STARS IN QUIGLEY ANNUAL POLLS OF TOP 10 BIGGEST BOX OFFICE STARS IN US AND CANADA
1/Mary Pickford – 13 consecutive entries 1914-1926 inclusive
2/Clara Bow – 5 consecutive entries 1927-1931 inclusive
3/Gloria Swanson – broken run of4 entries 1921-1925 inclusive
4/Lillian Gish NONE
BEST POSTERS SWANSON VIDEO
1/Bluebeard’s 8th Wife
2/Society Scandal
3/My American Wife
4/Prodigal Daughters
5/Hummingbird
6/two for Nero’s Mistress
7/Fine Manners
8/two for 3 for Bedroom C
9/Perfect Understanding
10/2nd one for Airport 75 – Chuck and Gloria!
11/Zaza
12/two for Indiscreet
13/Tonight or Never
14/1st 2 for Trespasser
15/Beyond the Rocks
16/Male and Female
17/entire set for Sunset Boulevard
18/Her Gilded Cage
19/1st one for What a Widow!
Hi Bob, thanks for the review, generous rating, info, trivia and stats, much appreciated. Glad you liked the posters, stills and lobby cards.
Looking at your post, Mary Pickford was the biggest female box office attraction of the silent era, the Myrna Loy of the 10s and 20s? [Bob winces]
I’ve seen just two of her films – Airport 1975 and Sunset Boulevard, thanks to her iconic performance in the latter her name didn’t fade like some of the other silent queens of Hollywood.
Erich von Stroheim directed her on Queen Kelly, probably her 2nd best movie and a ‘talkie’, Stroheim would co-star in Sunset Boulevard as her butler. The film Swanson and William Holden watch in the projection room is Queen Kelly.
[Swanson on being directed by Stroheim] – “The experience of working with him was unlike any I had had in more than 50 pictures. He was so painstaking and slow that I would lose all sense of time, hypnotized by the man’s relentless perfectionism.”
One film scored 10 out of 10 from my sources – Sunset Boulevard. Two scored 9 out of 10 – Male and Female and Queen Kelly. Five movies scored 8 out of 10 – Sadie Thompson, Music in the Air, Why Change Your Wife?, The Affairs of Anatol and The Love of Sunya.
Looking at Bruce’s box office chart – Airport 1975 was her biggest domestic hit in adjusted dollars followed by Male and Female.
Swanson on Airport 1975 – “I was holding out for a picture I could take my grandchildren to see, something exciting and contemporary without senseless violence.”
Swanson on Marlene Dietrich – “Her legs may be longer than mine, but unlike me, she doesn’t have 7 grandchildren.”
“After 16 years in pictures I could not be intimidated easily, because I knew where all the skeletons were buried.”
“It’s amazing to find that so many people, who I thought really knew me, could have thought that Sunset Blvd. was autobiographical. I’ve got nobody floating in my swimming pool.”
Bob, Flora, Bruce, I’m taking an extended Xmas break from youtube but I will be back hopefully in the new year with some new videos. I will of course be popping in here at Bruce’s Movie Café Americain for chats. Enjoy your holidays and stay safe.
I mentioned in my post that Queen Kelly was a talkie but it was in fact a ‘silent’ which started production in 1928, a part sound version was released in Europe and South America in 1932 according to Wikipedia –
“The production of the costly film was shut down after complaints by Swanson about the direction the film was taking. Though the European scenes were full of innuendo, and featured a philandering prince and a sex-crazed queen, the scenes set in Africa were grim and, Swanson felt, distasteful. In later interviews, Swanson had claimed that she had been misled by the script which referred to her character arriving in, and taking over, a dance hall; looking at the rushes, it was obvious the ‘dance hall’ was actually a brothel. “
Thanks for the normal welcome substantial feedback with the usual fine quotes. I note your additional post about Queen Kelly. Interesting about the ‘dance hall’ being actually a brothel. Durbin and Eugene Kelly’s 1944 Christmas Holiday was based on a Somerset Maugham story in which Deanna’s character was a prostitute.
However my Deanna balked at playing a hooker so for the film they made the character a “nightclub hostess” which critics claimed made a nonsense of the ending: Deanna’s screen husband Eugene came after her seeking vengeance at the end for besmirching his cherished family name with her profession, an extreme reaction which the function of nightclub hostess would not have justified.
Anyway in terms of popularity you simply CANNOT place the Thin Woman in the select company of Little Mary with Pickford’s 13 entries in Quigley’s Top 10: Thins had just 2 entries, one of the lowest counts that I have seen for a supposed major star.
I would have expected that; but what has greatly surprised me in view of the retrospective mega-status that he today has as THE silent star is that Chaplin too didn’t do well in the Quigley polls. He has no Top 10 entries at all and is listed in the Top 25 only twice: in 1926 and 1928 in position 25 both years. It could be that he was initially seen as just a slapstick comedian and not taken as seriously as dramatic thespians like Swanson, Pickford and Doug Fairbanks, Mary’s beau.
In fact Doug was in the Quigley annual Top 10s for 11 consecutive years from 1916-1926 inclusive with five of those years again consecutively at No 1 [twice] and No 2 [three times]. WOW! – Mary and Doug were undoubtedly the power COUPLE of the silent era.
You know that hoity-toity guys like for example The Work Horse and Hirsch can be condescending to thespians who play the clown or engage in light variety on screen so that stars like Abbott & Costello/Martin and Lewis/Hope & Crosby/Danny Kaye/and my Doris are constantly missing from Legends lists. Hence the genius of Charlie may not have been as initially appreciated as it is now.
I often think that this site is a great harbinger of as H G Wells expressed it “the shape of things to come”: no sooner is a new topic aired on Cogerson than it seems to start emerging from other sources.
W o Bob and I were watching 1961’s King of Kings starring Jeffrey Hunter as Christ last night and in one scene Jesus is talking to his disciple Simon Peter.
I turned to W o Bob and said “There was a whole row on the Cogerson site recently about whether or not that guy who is playing Simon Peter looks like your idol and mine, Greg Peck. What do you think?”
“What’s the actor’s name?” asked W o Bob to which I replied “He is called Royal Dano.”
“Well said W o Bob he looks nothing like Peck and he is not a very good actor either whilst as you know our Greg is a terrific actor.”
If I recall correctly Flora too dismissed the idea of Royal being a Greg ‘doppelganger’; so it would seem that the women have a keener eye than the men do for such things.
I could have added when discussing the matter with W o Bob that in 1951’s David and Delilah co-starring Angela Lansbury Greg looked and sounded supremely Biblical as King David;
whereas in King of Kings, Royal gave the impression of being a guy awkwardly and amateurly dressed up to appear in a Christmas nativity play and certainly did not come across as a character who could effectively answer Jesus’ call to “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” [Matthew 4:19]
I hope you enjoy your break and have a merry Xmas and a happy New Year. Unfortunately I find it hard to sleep nowadays over Christmas: I keep having nightmares about Santa coming down my chimney with a blood-stained axe! Anyway remember: keep safe – the coronovirus doesn’t need an axe!
As always Bob…you have provided some great information and trivia on one of Steve’s YouTube subjects.
Hey Steve….enjoy your break and have a great holiday.
wow! thanks for sharing this great information of Gloria Swanson.
I’m a big fan of her but sadly her box office in 1920s wasn’t that amazing as i thought. Because from her autobiography to newspapers magazines and other people’s description, she should be the most successful actress in the world except Mary Pickford at that time. Maybe they are lying LOL.
Anyway, i still love her. and thanks again.
one question, queen kelly had never been released in 1920s and 1930s, where did you get the box office data?
Hey Walter. First of all….thanks for stopping by and sharing your thoughts on Gloria Swanson. I think her movies with DeMille which were monster hits, created the image that all of her movies were monster box office hits. I think many of her movies were very profitable even though by today’s standards…they would not be massive hits. I think without a doubt she and Pickford were the biggest stars from the late teens to the late 20s. Hmmmm….interesting question about Queen Anne. I used some different sources when doing research for this page….so either they were wrong…or I typed an extra number in. It was released after the success of her Sunset Blvd….but did not earn nearly as much as we had stated. I will be fixing that right away. Thanks for the catch and the visit.