Movies have always had a powerful influence on people’s behavior, from how they talk to how they dress. Tobacco marketers took advantage of this power to popularize cigarettes over cigars and to make smoking by women socially acceptable. The number of women stars posing with cigarettes in the 1930s and 1940s may have been no accident. And paying stars to endorse cigarette brands in print and billboard advertising was certainly business as usual, until smoking’s link to lung cancer shattered tobacco’s glamorous image in the early 1960s
