There may be no greater era in the annals of American cinema than the illustrious Golden Age of Hollywood. This period, which spanned from the late 1920s to the early 1960s and peaked during the 1930s and 1940s, marked a time when attending the movies was an integral part of American life, unmatched by today’s fragmented media world. Many of the most revered American films were created during these years, drawing large audiences to theaters regularly, treating them almost like sacred spaces. At the heart of this era was the Hollywood star system, featuring the dazzling icons who captivated audiences and defined the cinematic experience.

Despite all the glitz and glamour, maintaining such a spectacle came at a significant personal cost for the actors who often endured arduous and challenging experiences behind the scenes. Being an actor in the old days of Hollywood involved facing intense scrutiny, rigid control, exploitation, and various forms of both psychological and physical intimidation. Even the most notable and highest-earning stars were expected to adhere to strict industry norms. Some of these rules still linger in today’s Hollywood, while others seem nearly unbelievable in retrospect. Here are 11 extremely rigid rules that governed the lives of Old Hollywood actors.

To grasp the working conditions for actors in Old Hollywood, it is crucial to understand the long-term contract system on which the studio era was predicated. During the late 1920s through the late 1940s, studios were well aware that countless aspiring talents were migrating to Los Angeles with dreams of being discovered and elevated to fame and success by the Hollywood machine. This gave studios the upper hand to lock actors into highly demanding contracts typically lasting around seven years, often enticing them with substantial financial offers that were almost impossible to decline.

The first, most important element of those contracts, naturally, was exclusivity; if an actor was under contract at a specific studio, then they were essentially employees of that studio, had to answer to it as functionaries, and couldn’t work for any other studio at the same time unless they were officially rented out. This allowed studios to build “stables” of beloved actors who could only be seen in their movies.

At the same time, the de facto status of movie stars as long-term employees, with their working obligations not being tied to specific projects and productions, made it easier for studios to impose any number of draconian obligations on them via contract — many of which far exceeded the scope of what was reasonable to request of them for the benefit of particular movies.

As full-time studio employees, and as such expected to fulfill a number of professional obligations, actors in Old Hollywood didn’t usually have much say in which roles they’d wind up playing. It was common practice in the industry to contractually force actors to work on numerous movies per year, regardless of how interested they were in each of those projects; once they were done with one, they were expected to move right on to the next. This arrangement held true even for iconic stars you’d think might have some degree of leverage in picking their movies. In fact, the insurrection of two such stars proved momentous in Hollywood history.

First, in 1936, following a series of unfulfilling film projects that left her career in a rut, prolific Warner Bros. Studios superstar Bette Davis defied the status quo by accepting roles in two British films and traveling to the U.K. to work in them. She was sued in the U.K., and the courts ultimately decided against her, making her return to the U.S. to complete her Hollywood contract.

Then, in 1943, Olivia de Havilland sued Warner Bros. to get out of an unwanted six-month extension of her contract, which was based on times the studio itself had suspended de Havilland for refusing to take roles she hated. De Havilland won, opening up a legal path for American film actors to start claiming sturdier labor rights.

You may not have heard of Frances Gumm, Betty Perske, Margaret Cansino, Ruby Stevens, and Archibald Leach, but you’re certainly familiar with the Hollywood stars to whom those real names belong: Judy Garland, Lauren Bacall, Rita Hayworth, Barbara Stanwyck, and Cary Grant. Screen names have never entirely gone out of style in Hollywood; Emma Stone is actually Emily, Jack Black is Thomas, etc. But, in Old Hollywood, they were an integral part of the process of shaping ordinary citizens into movie stars.

In many instances, stage names reflected the biases, prejudices, and exclusions baked into the Hollywood system. Americanizations of foreign-sounding names were commonplace. Actors such as Jerry Lewis (born Joseph Levitch), Tony Curtis (born Bernard Schwartz), Judy Holliday (born Judith Tuvim), Fred Astaire (born Frederick Austerlitz), Edward G. Robinson (born Emanuel Goldenberg), and Lee Grant (born Lyova Rosenthal) all used stage names that didn’t acknowledge their Jewish heritage. Archetypal Western macho man John Wayne actually worked under a stage name, with his real name being the much more gender-ambiguous Marion Morrison.

In one instance, one of the biggest stars of classic Hollywood was even given a name by the public and reportedly resented it. MGM head Louis B. Mayer held an open contest with a $1000 prize to pick a name for the studio’s newest signing, one Lucille Fay LeSueur, who sometimes also went by Billie Cassin. Ultimately, LeSueur was renamed Joan Crawford — a name she hated because it sounded like “crawfish.”

If you think about Old Hollywood’s iconography, remembering not just the movies but the way actors presented themselves in events, media appearances, and even their day-to-day lives, you may notice one common, conspicuous absence: pants on women. It feels wild to think about today, but it was not culturally normalized for women to wear pants in the U.S. until well into the second half of the 20th century. Back then, fashion was even more rigidly gendered than it is today, and pants were specifically thought of as a men’s thing, with all that entailed in terms of expectations of “glamour” and “elegance” and their associations with femininity for women. Studios’ wardrobe departments reflected that cultural norm by almost universally putting their female stars in skirts and dresses only, pressuring them to uphold that same dress code even while out and about.

The most notable exception to the rule, and arguably the earliest superstar devotee of the pantsuit in American movies, was Katharine Hepburn. But before she could help usher in the normalization of women’s pants in American fashion and become the actress with the most Oscars, Hepburn had to fight tooth and nail for this particular personal freedom. In one legendary instance, the staff at RKO Pictures stole her pants, attempting to force her to give up on wearing them and put on a skirt. Hepburn didn’t relent and reportedly walked around the studio in her underwear until her pants were returned.

The work that actors had to do in Old Hollywood didn’t stop at acting. Better yet, it would be more accurate to say that their work didn’t stop at playing roles in films. Instead, they had to put on full-time performances, carefully managing not just the lines and scenes in movie scripts but all the expectations that came with their industry-manicured fame and popularity. Movie stars in the ’30s-’50s were sold to the public as deities, untouched and unblemished by the dirt of common life, and were expected to behave as such.

This was, in fact, literally written into rule. From the early 1920s, it was common practice for studio contracts in Hollywood to include “morality clauses” whereby actors were obligated to observe certain mores of so-called decency and propriety in their personal lives and were prohibited from engaging in any sort of behavior that might bring infamy to themselves or to the studio. Using these clauses, studios instituted regimens of strict reputation management for actors, forcing them to keep up an image of purity and rectitude in accordance with reigning American social mores. Any scandals — from extramarital affairs to drug problems to vehicular accidents to crimes — were covered up by fixers, hush payments to authorities, and tense arrangements with the entertainment press. The work of appearing perfect was essentially a second job; to keep the illusion of the star system alive, actors pretty much had to publicly hide their own humanity.

One of the consequences of morality clauses was that studios had de facto control over their stars’ dating lives. Actors were supposed to ask studios for permission to date or get married, as their relationship status was found to directly impact their bankability. When an actor entered a relationship or got married without studio approval, as Judy Garland did by tying the knot with David Rose in 1941, it was a problem that often called for fixer interference. In some cases, studio heads’ meddling in stars’ love lives was even more aggressive. In 1957, Columbia Pictures head Harry Cohn reportedly took out a mob hit on Sammy Davis Jr. to intimidate him into cutting things off with the studio’s hottest up-and-coming star, Kim Novak, whom Davis had been dating in secrecy.

Studios’ marital interference wasn’t limited to prohibition, either; in many cases, they also arranged relationships for actors or goaded them into getting married and even produced lavish weddings for them. Gay, lesbian, and bisexual actors, in particular, were routinely forced into “lavender marriages” with actors of the opposite gender for show in order to appear straight to the public. This is widely speculated to have been the case of the legendary 12-year marriage between Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor, both of whom had rumors of homosexuality swirling around them and were pressured into getting married by MGM after dating for a few years.

To this day, the labor market all over the world frequently fails to provide mothers with the space and support to go through pregnancies and care for their kids without having their careers derailed. In the world of Golden Age Hollywood, that issue was aggravated tenfold. Not only were American labor laws for women much more lax in general — maternity leave wouldn’t become a widespread right in the U.S. until the ’70s — but studios, which treated their female stars as property, had the power to stop them from making life decisions that might hinder their ability to work at the same level of productivity or render their star personas less alluring to the public.

Fixer-orchestrated abortions were routine whenever actresses got pregnant from extramarital or non-studio-vetted relationships, and many of those abortions were outright forced. Even stars in studio-approved marriages were often forbidden to have children and would be threatened with heavy financial penalties if they failed to comply. Contract clauses stipulated retaliation in the form of salary cuts for actresses who had babies; rather than paid maternity leave, it was more likely for them to get fined for not coming to work.

With a vast number of high-paid actresses being plucked from working-class life and the specter of poverty hanging over their heads should they get fired, having kids was often unfeasible. Essentially, it would amount to having another mouth to feed while jobless and mired in public scorn and unhirability.

Queerness, androgyny, and the gleeful blurring of gender lines were actually a not-uncommon part of movie culture and show business in the 1920s. But by the time talkies, the studio system, and the Hays Code were firmly established in the 1930s, any trace of non-conformity with the mores of heteronormativity had gone flying out the window. In those decades, Hollywood and cultural homophobia fed each other like a vicious circle: the movies helped codify and dictate what was morally acceptable among the public and then kowtowed to those public expectations of acceptability. In the process, queer actors were not only barred from starring in overtly queer-themed stories but kept from being visibly queer in their own personal lives through the omnipresent stranglehold of the morality clauses.

We know, from the few who dared discuss it publicly, that Old Hollywood was, in fact, an extravaganza of queerness behind the scenes. Marlene Dietrich even famously coined the term “sewing circle” to refer to the dense web of sapphic relationships that existed between Hollywood actresses in those days. But everything had to be kept under wraps. On the rare occasion that actors refused to play coy about their sexuality, they were punished for it. After openly living with his partner, Jimmie Shields, for nearly a decade, MGM’s William Haines was ordered by Louis B. Mayer in 1933 to get a lavender marriage. He refused, got fired, became an interior designer, and continued to live with Shields until his death in 1973.

The doctoring of actors’ public images by studios also extended to their physical appearances. In the Old Hollywood star system, beauty and desirability were considered paramount — sometimes even taking precedence over talent and artistry — and the rules of beauty were, as everything else, set by conservative and misogynistic playbooks. If thinness and weight loss are unofficially demanded of movie stars today through public pressure and the market of roles, back in Old Hollywood, the demand was even more formal. It was common for contracts to outright forbid weight gain above a certain limit. It goes without saying, of course, that those rules bore down harder on female actors.

Thinness culture was so widespread in Hollywood as early as the 1920s that, when Greta Garbo — already very much a thin woman by any definition — traveled to the U.S. and was signed by MGM in 1925, Louis B. Mayer ordered her to lose weight because “fat women” were not liked in the U.S. A few years later, a highly dangerous 18-day radical weight loss diet undertaken by Ethel Barrymore became a fever among Hollywood actresses and American women in general. Actresses ranging from Judy Garland to Marlene Dietrich to Kim Novak had dramatic struggles with Hollywood weight standards, and controversial nutritionist Gayelord Hauser became a highly sought-after name among Hollywood actresses for his radical dieting methods and their promise to help stars conform to studios’ preposterous weight limits.

Old Hollywood was all about productivity — churning out as many movies as possible, as fast as possible, for as little money as possible, keeping the studio-owned theaters always packed with new releases — and that productivity was achieved by any means necessary. Labor conditions in all fields of filmmaking were lacking across the board at the time, including for actors. If unhealthily long work hours are still a chronic issue in Hollywood today, they were an even more extreme issue all those decades and guild strikes ago.

The picture painted by set stories from those days is often horrifying: morning-to-night workdays, constant all-nighters, multi-day shooting marathons, and grueling song-and-dance rehearsals. Judy Garland once recounted being worked for 72 hours straight alongside Mickey Rooney. The secret to sustaining that inhuman work pace? Drugs. Or, in Hollywood parlance, “pep pills” — a.k.a. amphetamines. Pills to work as long and energetically as possible, pills to sleep for as little as humanly necessary, rinse, repeat.

Part of the reason so many actors in Old Hollywood developed substance issues was the completely banalized role of the “pep pills” in enabling studios’ frenzied production lines. Debbie Reynolds wrote in her 2013 memoir that she was nearly pressured into a drug habit when the wild production schedule of “Singin’ in the Rain” began to take a toll on her health. Even directors like David O. Selznick relied on amphetamines to keep up the pace.

Being a child star has never been easy, in any era of showbiz history. Even today’s stars struggle with the enormous pressures and hazards of being pushed into the public eye and such a problematic industry at a young age — but it used to be even worse. In fact, for most of the 1930s, child actors in Hollywood were laboring under an exploitative state of exception compared to, well, any other kid in the United States. In 1927, in response to pressure from movie studios, the California Civil Code included a provision that child actors could no longer disaffirm their contracts without repercussions (a right of all children under California law at the time) once a superior court vetted those contracts.

In practice, this provision trapped child actors — who were often signed at a very young age, before they could have possibly developed the ability to evaluate contracts — into any number of abusive work conditions. The moment a judge approved their contract, they were bound to it and couldn’t get out, even if they were being robbed in broad daylight by studios and/or by their parents. A 1938 law attempted to address the issue in response to the scandal of child superstar Jackie Coogan being left penniless as an adult after his mother and stepfather spent nearly all his money — but it still wasn’t quite enough to keep child stars like Judy Garland, Shirley Temple, and Elizabeth Taylor from being exploited.