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A Star Is Born is a 1937 film produced by David O. Selznick and directed by William A. Wellman, with a script by Wellman, Robert Carson, Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell. It stars Janet Gaynor as an aspiring actress who travels to Hollywood to become a movie star. She meets an actor, played by Fredric March and they marry but soon after his career enters a downward spiral while hers flourishes. Some Hollywood theorists believe that the marriage of Barbara Stanwyck and Frank Fay was the film's real-life inspiration. John Bowers has also been identified as inspiration for the Norman Maine character and the dramatic suicide by drowning scene at the end of the film, eventhough he drowned in Nov. 1936.