Frances Farmer
Frances Farmer was an American actress who according to Dr. Walter Freeman underwent a lobotomy which he performed and of which he had a photograph of the procedure being completed. The State Hospital at which Freeman claimed the procedure was done denied that it had taken place, as did Farmer’s doctor. When Farmer herself was released from the hospital she demonstrated in subsequent interviews a flat personality and demeanor, totally at odds with her former personality, characteristics consistent with many post lobotomy patients.
As an actress, Frances Farmer enjoyed success in the 1930s in films, although she exhibited a temperamental character and a rebellious streak against the studio system at the time. She also drank consistently and in ever-increasing amounts, leading to her developing a reputation of being somewhat difficult to work with. When not filming in Hollywood she appeared in several Broadway productions. Eventually, in the early 1940s Paramount Studio’s, which had held her under contract since 1935, suspended her after she refused a film role to which she had been assigned. Her marriage had failed as well.
In 1942 she was ticketed for violating wartime blackout regulations, an act which opened a series of events in which she behaved erratically with police officers, judges, and security guards. Jailed, she was transferred to the Psychiatric Ward at Los Angeles General, where she was diagnosed as manic depressive. She was sent to Kimball Sanitarium, where she was diagnosed as having paranoid schizophrenia, for which she was given insulin shock therapy. Eventually, she was placed in Western State Hospital in Washington after a legal battle between her parents and the State of California.
She was released as cured after some months in Western State Hospital, but further misadventures followed, some of them becoming national news due to her fame as an actress. Eventually, she was returned to Western State Hospital, where she remained for nearly five years, and it was there that Dr. Freeman claimed to have performed a lobotomy on her near the end of her stay. The hospital and Farmer’s family deny the operation took place, but numerous allegations of missing records and unauthorized treatments against the hospital and its staff were made following Farmer’s stay there.
After her release and through the 1950s and 1960s she made sporadic attempts at a comeback, achieving some success on television as the hostess of her own show in Indianapolis and occasionally appearing as a guest star on others. Eventually, she quit drinking although she denied ever having been an alcoholic. In the mid-1960s she began exhibiting erratic behavior again and was fired from her show, after being asked on national television a question about her years in treatment. It is believed that the question triggered either suppressed memories, or stress, or both. She died in 1970 of cancer, at the age of 56.