1902–1968 · American actress & professional scandal
Tallulah Bankhead was an American actress who conquered the London stage in the 1920s and Broadway in the 1930s and 1940s — The Little Foxes, The Skin of Our Teeth, Hitchcock’s Lifeboat — and who built a second, louder career out of being quotable. Her husky voice and calculated outrageousness made her one of the most reliably attributed wits of her century, which is exactly why lines like this one detach from her and drift toward other famous names. By her own account in Tallulah: My Autobiography (1952), she cultivated the drug rumours deliberately: the cocaine lozenges were a real prescription for her laryngitis, and the joke was the point.