Personal Life
Odets's first wife was the twice-winning Academy-Award actress Luise Rainer. His second wife was actress Bette Grayson. He also had relationships with actresses Frances Farmer and Fay Wray, among others. Grayson's death at 34 left Odets to care for their two children, Nora, born in 1945, and Walt Whitman, now a clinical psychologist, author and photographer, born in 1947.
Odets was hospitalized in midsummer 1963 with advanced colon cancer. He died at age 57 on August 14. He received bedside visits from such movie and theater friends as Marlon Brando, Lee Strasberg and Paula Strasberg, Jean Renoir and his wife, Dido, Elia Kazan, Harold Clurman, Shirley MacLaine, and Danny Kaye, among others. Renoir dedicated a chapter of his autobiography to his friendship with Odets. Kazan's autobiography also contains copious references to his relationship with Odets. Kaye would eventually star in the musical version of The Flowering Peach, entitled Two by Two.
Odets's ashes were interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.
Read more about this topic: Clifford Odets
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