She wasn’t supposed to be there, an Ohio farm girl with dirt under her nails, suddenly drowning in gowns and spotlights.
The studio men signed her, lined her up with the big shots, told her she had the face, the figure, the shine.
And she did. Hell, she could’ve run the whole town.
But she turned her back on the klieg lights, not because she was broken or burned out, no, she walked straight into the cage with Howard Hughes, the billionaire phantom who collected women the way some men collect sports cars.
Her story wasn’t scandal, it wasn’t failure.
It was survival.
It was loyalty.
It was slipping out of Hollywood’s drunken grin into the long shadow of a man who never let her go.
The Girl from Canton
Elizabeth Jean Peters was born in 1926 on a small farm outside Canton, Ohio. Her father managed a laundry; her mother kept house. Jean grew up like many Midwestern kids of her generation, doing chores, excelling at school, and assuming she’d go on to a normal career. She studied literature at Ohio State University with the intention of becoming a teacher.
Fate intervened in 1945, when she entered a campus beauty contest. The prize was a screen test in Hollywood — and to Jean’s surprise, she won. She had never seriously dreamed of being an actress, but curiosity and opportunity pulled her west. When 20th Century Fox boss Darryl F. Zanuck saw her test, he signed her on the spot. Within months, she was pulled from her classes in Columbus and flown to Los Angeles, her life changed forever.
The Studio Starlet
Her first role was no small assignment: the female lead opposite Tyrone Power in Captain from Castile (1947), a Technicolor swashbuckler that Fox mounted as one of its big prestige pictures. Originally, the part was meant for Linda Darnell, but Jean stepped in and made the most of it. Audiences responded to her natural, unforced screen presence — she looked glamorous enough for the close-ups, but she didn’t seem like she belonged only to the dream world of Hollywood. There was something earthy about her, a trait that would define much of her career.
Fox marketed her aggressively, putting her in a series of roles designed to showcase her versatility. She played in comedies, westerns, melodramas. Zanuck, who loved her athletic look, often cast her in “outdoor” parts — tough frontier women, Native American heroines, pirates. “I was usually an Indian or a lady pirate,” Peters joked years later.
But there were real highlights. In 1951 she starred in Anne of the Indies, playing a female pirate captain with swagger and a sword. Critics noted her charisma and physicality, rare qualities in an era when most actresses were confined to the role of glamorous decoration. In 1952 she was cast opposite Marlon Brando in Elia Kazan’s Viva Zapata! as the loyal wife of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. It was a serious, dramatic role, the kind that gave her credibility as more than just a pretty face.
Her best performance, though, came in Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (1953). Fuller had considered casting Marilyn Monroe in the role of Candy, a hard-luck pickpocket who falls in with a petty crook, but he chose Peters instead. He said Monroe was too soft for the part; Peters had the toughness, the grit, the edge. She played Candy as both streetwise and vulnerable, giving the film its emotional anchor. Critics praised her work, and for a moment Peters seemed poised to break into the top ranks of leading ladies.
Yet Jean never leaned into the studio’s attempts to turn her into a sex symbol. She disliked the Hollywood party circuit, disliked phony glamour, and often pushed back when producers tried to remold her. “I’m not the sweater-and-wiggle type,” she said flatly when asked why she didn’t chase roles like Monroe’s. She preferred down-to-earth characters, women who looked like they’d lived a real life. That authenticity kept her from superstardom but also set her apart.
Other films of note included Niagara (1953), where she played the moral counterpoint to Monroe’s scheming femme fatale, and Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), a glossy romance shot on location in Rome. In Apache (1954), she held her own opposite Burt Lancaster as a Native American woman, a performance praised for its dignity. Her final role came in A Man Called Peter (1955), playing the frail but supportive wife of a minister. She was only 29 when she retired.
Enter Howard Hughes
The reason Jean Peters left Hollywood had little to do with acting and everything to do with Howard Hughes.
She first met him in 1946, when she was still new in town. He was nearly twice her age, already famous as an aviator, movie producer, and billionaire. Hughes was notorious for chasing starlets, but something about Peters stuck with him. She wasn’t dazzled by money or power. She was frank, modest, unwilling to play the Hollywood game — exactly the opposite of the hangers-on who usually surrounded him.
Their relationship was on-again, off-again for years. Jean focused on her career, Hughes pursued other women, but they kept circling back. By 1954 she briefly married another man, oilman Stuart Cramer, but the marriage lasted barely a month. Friends said she couldn’t get Hughes out of her system.
In 1957, at the age of 30, Jean Peters married Howard Hughes in a secret ceremony in Nevada. The wedding was so secretive that the press didn’t even know it had happened until weeks later. For Hollywood, it was a bombshell: one of Fox’s brightest stars marrying the most mysterious man in America, then vanishing almost overnight.
Life in the Shadows
From the moment she became Mrs. Hughes, Jean Peters’ life changed. She retired from acting and largely disappeared from public view. Hughes insisted on privacy to an extreme degree. At first they lived in separate bungalows at the Beverly Hills Hotel, meeting occasionally like neighbors rather than newlyweds. Later they moved into large estates in Rancho Santa Fe and Bel Air, but even there they often occupied separate suites.
Hughes’ eccentricities deepened with age. His obsessive fear of germs, his erratic behavior, his long disappearances into darkened rooms or hotel penthouses — all of it became part of Jean’s daily reality. Rumors swirled that she was being held captive, that she was desperately unhappy, that she was invisible. The truth was stranger but more mundane: she adapted.
She filled her time with ordinary pursuits. She enrolled at UCLA under her real name to study psychology and anthropology. She volunteered, recorded books for the blind, even knocked on doors conducting political surveys. Sometimes she went to ballgames, slipping into the crowd unnoticed. Friends who did see her said she seemed calm, even content, despite the odd arrangement.
Yet the isolation took its toll. Hughes would sometimes require her to communicate with him only by notes passed through aides. Their marriage, more companionship than intimacy, lasted 13 years. By 1970, Peters had had enough. She filed for divorce, asking only for a modest annual settlement. The court granted her $70,000 a year for life — hardly a fortune compared to Hughes’ billions, but Jean wanted freedom, not money.
When the press swarmed her afterward, hoping for gossip, she refused. She would not speak ill of Hughes, would not confirm the stranger stories. She maintained her dignity and silence, earning respect even from skeptics.
A Second Act
In 1971, Jean Peters remarried, this time to Stanley Hough, a former Fox assistant director and studio executive. Unlike the Hughes marriage, this one was simple, supportive, and happy. They lived quietly in California until his death in 1990.
Jean dabbled in acting again in the 1970s and 80s, mostly television work — a play adaptation here, a miniseries there, even a guest role on Murder, She Wrote. But she never sought to return to stardom. Her days of movie premieres and billboards were behind her. She preferred her garden, her studies, her charities.
In her later years, she was involved in causes like autism awareness and education. She remained resolutely private, rarely giving interviews, and when she did, she spoke modestly of her career. “I never really cared for being a star,” she once said. “I just wanted to be real.”
Jean Peters died in 2000 at the age of 73.
Legacy
So how do we remember Jean Peters? For film fans, she’s the tough-minded Candy in Pickup on South Street, the determined pirate queen in Anne of the Indies, the woman who stood toe-to-toe with Brando in Viva Zapata! and Lancaster in Apache. She was beautiful but unpretentious, talented but uninterested in the trappings of stardom.
For gossip historians, she’s the woman who married Howard Hughes and vanished into his strange, paranoid world — the only woman, some say, he truly loved.
But perhaps the most honest legacy is this: Jean Peters lived life on her own terms. She took what she wanted from Hollywood, then walked away. She endured years of secrecy and strangeness with Hughes, then freed herself without bitterness. She built a second life far from the limelight, surrounded by the kind of normalcy she’d always craved.
Jean Peters may not have the name recognition of Monroe or Taylor, but her story is no less fascinating. In fact, it’s almost more so: the starlet who turned her back on stardom, the wife who refused to betray her husband’s secrets, the woman who insisted on being herself even when the world wanted her to be something else.
In an industry built on illusion, that may be her most remarkable role of all.
