Hollywood & Crime: The Not-So-Mysterious Death of Thelma Todd

Was it the lover? The cuckolded wife? The gangster ex-husband? Or just a sad accident? The death of one of Hollywood’s original blonde bombshells sparked an ongoing cycle of conspiracies.

Thelma Alice Todd was born in 1906. She hoped to become a schoolteacher and earned money as a teen doing beauty pageants. In 1925, she won the title of Miss Massachusetts, which led to her being scouted by a Hollywood talent agent. He got her involved in a scheme that Paramount was running called the Paramount Players School. It was essentially a publicity scheme that claimed to train would-be actors for a spot on the big screen, but you still had to pay to participate. The possibility of a contract with the studio was dangled above the students' heads, but it never materialised for Thelma or most of her classmates.

Still, Thelma was gorgeous, and she was offered work at Hal Roach Studios, which specialised in comedy shorts featuring the likes of Harold Lloyd and the Little Rascals. It was here that Thelma realised she had a gift for comedy, especially as the talkies era began and she was able to more thoroughly craft her persona as a canny straight woman amid the revelry. She worked with Laurel and Hardy. Buster Keaton, and the Marx brothers, and she was one half of Hollywood's first female comedy duo when she was paired up with ZaSu Pitts for a series of shorts. The pair usually played modern working girls bumping up against all manner of antics. Thelma may have been the hot blonde, but she was never a dumb one.

She could also do dramatic roles. She appears in the original version of The Maltese Falcon from 1931 and had the starring role in Corsair, a sweeping pre-Code crime drama directed by Roland West. In the 1920s, West was a big enough deal as a director that he started having his name listed on posters by the movie title. The Bat, released in 1926, was one of his biggest hits and is now widely credited as a key inspiration for the creation of Batman. Corsair was positioned as a chance for Todd to reinvent herself as a classic leading lady. She even changed her name to Alison Lloyd so viewers wouldn’t be confused by a comedy queen’s presence in a serious drama. This infuriated Hal Roach, who thought Todd was insulting his comedic work through this shift. But Thelma wanted to do serious roles, maybe more so than funny ones, and West thought he could make it happen.

The pair became involved with one another before shooting began, kicking off a years-long tempestuous relationship. But there was a problem: Roland was married.