Welcome to Significant Others, a podcast that takes a look at the less familiar side

of history.

I'm Liza Powell O'Brien, and in this episode, we learn about a woman whose husband achieved

not only fame, but also infamy during the course of his career.

And it's possible that none of it, the good or the bad, would have happened if they hadn't

fallen in love before his work even began.

This was a marriage that truly lived up to the promise of, for better and for worse.

This time, on Significant Others, meet Molly Day Thatcher.

Character is destiny.

So goes the wisdom of the philosopher and the dramatist.

The idea being that perhaps our path in life is not determined so much by what's outside,

like fate or chance, but what's inside, the nature of our character and the choices

it leads us to make, like Icarus, or King Lear, or Bernie Madoff.

But how does this idea apply to a marriage?

What do you call it when two people affect each other's lives in ways that might be more

profound than anything that could have happened that they had never met?

Alia Kazan was a legendary director of stage and screen.

These films are among the best in cinematic history, classics like On the Waterfront and

a Streetcar named Desire.

He launched the careers of James Dean and Marlon Brando, Warren Beatty and Eva Marie St.

And yet his actions at a very specific moment in history were so divisive that when he was

given a special lifetime achievement Oscar nearly a half century later, he was publicly

...