American actress, given a contract with Columbia while still in her teens. Her straightforward freshness was seen in small parts in major films before she was quite 14. She also worked in radio, and started her cheesecake career with photographer Tom Kelly (who shot the famous Monroe calendar.) Still a teen, she was once on five magazine covers in one week. At that time, she was still more in love with her horse than any leading men.
Her adult films include “Come Back, Little Sheba,” 1952, a film which earned her an Oscar nomination. “Peyton Place,” 1957, was about the last big movie that she made.
Moore was secretly married to Howard Hughes when she was 19 and he was 42 in the fall of 1949. They never divorced but she went on, after his death, to marry an additional four times. In 1951 she wed footballer Glenn Davis for a period of two months. Her name was linked with a stream of beaus and she put sex on the 49th parallel when entertaining the troops in an ermine swimsuit.
Moore went on to fight a seven-year legal battle to win a case as Hughes’ widow, and was awarded a chunk of his estate estimated to be worth between $10 and $40 million dollars. After the lawsuit she returned to films and TV, having her last screen role in 1976. She had the distinction in the mid-’80s of being “the oldest girl who has ever been on the cover with a layout in Playboy magazine,” with, as she proudly noted, “every photo unretouched.”
She wrote two autobiographies, “Howard Be Thy Name,” 1983 and “The Beauty And The Billionaire.”
Link to Wikipedia biography