Barbara Loden was born in 1932 in Marion, North Carolina. She was a Broadway Tony award-winning actress, model and film director. In 1970 she directed Wanda, becoming the first woman to write, direct, and star in her own independent film. The film was the only American film accepted to, and which won, the International Critics’ Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1970. In 2010, with support from Gucci, the film was restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive and screened at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.
Barbara Loden married Elia Kazan [director of On the Waterfront (1954) and East of Eden (1955)] in 1967 and the couple stayed together until 1980, the year in which Loden died, a victim of cancer.