I recently read Victoria Wilson’s giant biography of Barbara Stanwyck1 (which is only volume one of a promised two), and one of the many things that stood out to me was that Stanwyck was injured basically all the time.2 She falls ten feet on a movie set, dislocates her spine—which frankly I didn’t even know you could do—and is told to rest. She doesn’t. A horse falls on Stanwyck and she insists on “finishing the scene,” which means swimming fifty yards in the ocean with “two sprained ankles and a dislocated coccyx.” She’s warned she may never walk again.
But instead of resting, she keeps going to work every day:
Barbara refused to miss a day’s work. At the end of each day’s shooting, she went to the hospital to spend the night in traction. Capra had a slant board built for her to lean against between takes.
One of the camera assistant…