Celebrity Style

15 Pictures of the Most Glamorous 1950s Celebrities at Home

The stars of Hollywood’s golden age sure loved a casual domestic photo shoot
Image may contain Natalie Wood Furniture Bed Bedroom Indoors Room Clothing Dress Adult Person Wedding and Face
A teenage Natalie Wood pictured getting ready for a date in June 1955.Photo: Graphic House/Archive Photos/Getty Images

If only Open Door videos had been around during the heydays of 1950s celebrities like Audrey Hepburn and Lucille Ball. Judging by the fun lounging-around-the-house photo shoots that 1950s A-listers from Clark Gable to Jayne Mansfield have left behind, it seems as though the biggest names in Hollywood loved inviting the camera into their home lives about as much as the cameras loved them. If vintage style or golden age starlets and leading men are your thing, step back in time with 15 old-school cool images of ’50s stars at home.

  • Jayne Mansfield in heartshaped tub with mosaic tile gilded hand mirrors combs glass bottle “JM” monogrammed pink towel...
    Photo: Richard C. Miller/Donaldson Collection/Getty Images
    1/15

    Jayne Mansfield

    “All my life, I’ve dreamed of a place full of cupids and angels and hearts,” Mansfield once said. It seems she got her wish in the Mediterranean-style LA manse she shared with actor and bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay (their daughter is Law and Order: SVU star Mariska Hargitay), designed by Glenn Holse, who had also designed her Las Vegas nightclub show. The Girl Can’t Help It star’s affinity for rosy hues and high femme aesthetics earned the home its moniker, “the Pink Palace.” Her bathroom’s floors, ceilings, and walls were swathed in pink shag.

  • Photo: Bettmann / Getty Images
    2/15

    Clark Gable

    About 20 miles from Hollywood, the town’s so-called “King” Gable kept a 20-acre Encino, California, ranch with his fifth wife, Kay Williams. He had originally purchased the place with third spouse, Carole Lombard, though he maintained the dwelling years after her death until his own, nearly two decades later in 1960. According to a 1990 AD feature, the home’s second floor comprised of two adjoining primary suites—Gable’s decked out in brown and beige, and the space originally for Lombard in blue and white.

  • Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
    3/15

    Marilyn Monroe

    The iconic Some Like It Hot bombshell played host to members of the press for a soiree at the Los Angeles abode where she was staying in 1956, the same year she married playwright Arthur Miller. Monroe reportedly lived at over 40 different addresses in her 36 years. She became a homeowner for the first time after purchasing her 1920s Brentwood, LA hacienda, where she died in 1962.

  • Photo: Bettmann / Getty Images
    4/15

    Lucille Ball

    The I Love Lucy actor and comedian maintained a Southern California ranch home on five bucolic acres of San Fernando Valley property. Dubbed “Desilu Ranch,” a portmanteau of Ball’s and her husband Desi Arnaz’s names, the Devonshire Street dwelling cost the power couple around $16,000 in 1941. The pair kept a number of animals on the sprawling estate, including a cow called the Duchess of Devonshire and a number of chickens. “She’d fall in love with the chickens and wouldn’t kill them,” said I Love Lucy writer and Ball’s friend Madelyn Pugh Davis. “She had the oldest chickens in the Valley.”

  • Photo: QUINIO/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
    5/15

    Brigitte Bardot

    Today, the 89-year-old actor, singer, and animal rights activist reportedly lives in a lavish Saint Tropez villa. In the 1950s, the starlet and ballerina called a charming Paris apartment home.

  • Photo: Earl Leaf/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
    6/15

    Natalie Wood

    Wood, her parents, and her sister, Lana, moved around throughout California’s San Fernando Valley in her early career as a teenage movie star. The young actor lived with her family in a stucco-and-stone ’50s modern three-bedroom as she rose to prominence through films like Rebel Without a Cause. Per an April 2000 AD feature, Wood’s bedroom suite hosted a large double bed, a private bathroom, a dressing room, and a sitting area.

  • Photo: CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images
    7/15

    Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward

    Academy Award–winning duo Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward opened their home to cameras on several occasions throughout their 50 years of marriage. Pictured here, the two hosted journalist Edward Murrow for his Person to Person celebrity interview show in their 11th Street abode in New York’s Greenwich Village. The actors’ Beverly Hills rental, a Colonial Revival–style four-bedroom, made a cozy set for a New York Daily News photo shoot in 1962.

  • Photo: Bettmann / Getty Images
    8/15

    Audrey Hepburn

    The Belgian-born Roman Holiday star kept a New York City apartment, pictured here in 1954 shortly before the release of her romantic comedy Sabrina. She resided in England, the Netherlands, and California throughout her life, but Hepburn’s 1961 role in the screen adaptation of Truman Capote’s novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s would make the Oscar winner a symbol of the Big Apple.

  • Photo: Graphic House/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
    9/15

    Sal Mineo

    Bronx-born Mineo found his Hollywood breakthrough with his supporting role in the iconic James Dean drama Rebel Without a Cause. Pictured here is the actor painting in the kitchen of his family home in November 1955, the month after the now classic film’s release. The Mineos relocated to the New York town of Mamaroneck from the Bronx in 1956, after the young Oscar nominee bought a $200,000 residence following his early career success.

  • Photo: Al Morcil/Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty Images
    10/15

    Doris Day

    On 713 North Crescent Drive, within the coveted 90210 zip code, the singer and dancer held a housewarming party to celebrate her new Beverly Hills dwelling with stars like Clark Gable in attendance. Day, an animal rights advocate, also owned a pet-friendly hotel in picturesque seaside Carmel, California, called the Cypress Inn.

  • Photo: CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images
    11/15

    Marlon Brando

    Shortly after the 30-year-old Brando won an Academy Award for his starring role in the 1954 crime drama On the Waterfront, CBS’s Person to Person aired their interview with the actor, who chatted with Murrow from his Hollywood Hills rental. “I’m up in the hills you see, way above the city,” he said on the broadcast. “I have a good vantage point here. It’s awfully nice to come out here in the evenings to have dinner at this sort of nook, especially on warm nights, when the desert wind comes up over the hills.”

  • Photo: CBS via Getty Images
    12/15

    Eartha Kitt

    The activist and triple-threat entertainer from South Carolina opened her Manhattan home on Riverside Drive to cameras for a 1954 feature on CBS’s Person to Person. Kitt’s 13-floor penthouse reportedly marked the “Santa Baby” singer’s very first solo abode.

  • Photo: CBS via Getty Images
    13/15

    Liberace

    His unique headboard was not the “I’ll Be Seeing You” singer’s only musically-themed decor. In classic over-the-top Liberace fashion, the star’s piano-shaped pool was bordered by a row of black-and-white keys in homage to the instrument that made him an icon.

  • Photo: Archive Photos/Getty Images
    14/15

    Elizabeth Taylor

    The violet-eyed British American movie star, pictured here in 1950, grew up in Hampstead, London, before relocating to California. Taylor lived in a red roof-tiled Spanish-style Beverly Hills house for about a decade, up until her wedding to hotel heir Conrad “Nicky” Hilton Jr., at the age of 18. After a brief marriage, she moved into her own LA apartment and divided her time between that residence and the London home of Michael Wilding, whom she married in 1952.

  • Photo: CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images
    15/15

    Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis

    When the actors (parents to Oscar winner Jamie Lee Curtis) wed in 1951, they bought a Beverly Hills estate that Leigh “furnished like her own dollhouse,” according to Hitchcock’s Blondes author Laurence Leamer. Leigh reportedly worked hard to keep the place totally spotless and impeccably ordered, “as if expecting at any moment a photographer from a fan magazine to arrive to shoot life at home with Janet and Tony,” writes Leamer in an excerpt from Blondes.

Charlotte Collins is a digital features editor at Architectural Digest reporting news and features at the intersection of pop culture and design. She was formerly an assistant editor at InStyle magazine and has also worked in broadcast for CBS This Morning and 48 Hours. Her news, design, and entertainment coverage... Read more
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