In Douglas Sirk's emotionally and visually extravagant final film IMITATION OF LIFE, a life's work of subverted melodrama and razor-sharp social commentary are brought to a resounding and baroque climax. In a role that closely resembles and perhaps parodies her own life, Lana Turner plays Lora Meredith, an aspiring actress and single mother who meets Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore), a black and similarly single and struggling mother. When they move in together, Annie assumes the role of domestic servant and the two women struggle together to raise their two daughters. Annie's daughter, Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner), favors her father whose skin tone resembles her own extremely light skin, and she slowly comes to resent her mother's black identity. Transcending the feminist labeling that IMITATION OF LIFE risked, the film freely mixes Meredith's rags to riches (with a hefty moral price tag) tale with Annie's scarring struggles to teach her daughter to accept her identity. As Meredith climbs higher and higher in her glamorous rise to stage and screen stardom, she ignores her vulnerable daughter Susie (Sandra Dee) and creates a devastating contrast for the racial and social tragedy that transpires in her own household. With a deft mixture of icy detachment and morose sentimentality rendered through a transcendent art direction, Sirk leads the film onto an inimitable crescendo of highly adorned emotion and tragedy.

"Imitation of Life" was director Douglas Sirk's last feature film.

The film was a remake of the 1934 version.

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Lana Turner: American Actress
Juanita Moore: American Character Actress
John Gavin: American Actor/Ex-Ambassador/ Boring Guy in PSYCHO
Susan Kohner: American Actress
Sandra Dee: American Actress
Dan O'Herlihy: Irish Actor
Robert Alda: American Actor

Douglas Sirk: Director/Producer

Ross Hunter: Producer

Eleanore Griffin: Writer- Harvey Girls
Allan Scott: Screenwriter of the 1930s to the 1960s

Frank Skinner: American Composer/D. 1968
Joseph Gershenson: Music Director/Music Supervisor

Milton Carruth: American Editor\1950s

"...A prime example of a brilliant director's stealthy use of a denigrated genre to slip in subtle social comment and genuine pathos..."
"[P]assionately directed..."
"[A] Lana Turner soap opera turned into an exercise in metaphysical formalism by Sirk's finely textured and densely layered images."