Samson and Delilah was also the last film in which Hedy Lamarr commanded first billing in a major studio production. The 1950s were hard on actresses of her generation. The studios were contracting, television was arriving, and the audience’s attention was moving in new directions. She made a few more films — Copper Canyon (1950), My Favorite Spy (1951), Lemon Drop Kid (1951), The Story of Mankind (1957), The Female Animal (1958) — but none of them returned her to the prominence she had held a decade earlier. The Female Animal was her last film.
She did not work in film after 1958. She was forty-three years old.
## The Years of Difficulty
What followed was not a clean decline but something more complicated: a life moving between legal problems, financial difficulty, failed relationships, and episodes of erratic behavior that those around her attributed to various causes, none of them flattering. In 1966, she published an autobiography titled Ecstasy and Me, which she later said she had not fully authorized and which contained material she claimed was invented or distorted. She sued to stop publication; the lawsuit was dismissed in September 1966, and the book became a best-seller. She won no benefit from that.
She was arrested for shoplifting in the 1960s, and arrested again in 1991, in a case that received wide coverage at a moment when shoplifting charges were not the kind of story the tabloids let go easily. The 1991 arrest, in which she was accused of taking merchandise from a Sav-On drug store in Altamonte Springs, Florida, was ultimately dismissed. She was seventy-six years old at the time.