Made for $2 million, Imitation of Life grossed $6.4 million during its initial U.S. release, placing number five on the year's list of top box-office films. By 1970, it had made over $25 million worldwide.

AWARDS & HONORS

Imitation of Life received Photoplay magazine's Laurel Award for Best Drama.

Both Susan Kohner and Juanita Moore were nominated for Golden Globes for Best Supporting Actress, with Kohner winning the award.

Douglas Sirk was nominated for the Directors Guild Award but lost to William Wyler for Ben-Hur (1959).

Both Kohner and Moore won Oscar® nominations for Best Supporting Actress. They lost to Shelley Winters in The Diary of Anne Frank (1959).

"Imitation of Life crosses a succession of emotional bridges, hitting the heart with each step in one of the best Universal films of recent years. It's a film that will benefit from word-of-mouth, particularly of lipsticked mouth." Variety.

"...Miss Turner and the others act unreally and elaborately...[They] do not give an imitation of life. They give an imitation of movie acting at its less graceful level twenty-five years ago." -- Bosley Crowther, The New York Times.

"When passed before the moviegoer's eyes, it may force theatre owners to install aisle scuppers to drain off the tears." -- Time Magazine

"…it has a genuinely touching sub-plot involving a stanch Negro woman and her wayward daughter. To these two roles Juanita Moore and Susan Kohner bring a degree of emotion that virtually dissolved the audience watching the film with me. This is life as they would like to believe it, and it makes good movie material -- at least for a matinee." -- Arthur Knight, The Saturday Review.

"Sirk's last movie in Hollywood is a coldly brilliant weepie, a rags-to-riches tale of two intertwined families, in which the materialist optimism is continually counterpointed by an emphasis upon racial tension and the degeneration of family bonds...Forget those who decry the '50s Hollywood melodrama: it is through the conventions of that hyper-emotional genre that Sirk is able to make such a devastatingly embittered and pessimistic movie." - Geoff Andrew, TimeOut Movie Guide (Penguin).

"Fine performances and direction overcome possible soapiness to make this quite credible and moving." - Leonard Maltin's Classic Movie Guide (Plume).

"Stunningly produced but dully acted, making its racially sensitive plot seem insincere." - Halliwell's Film & Video Guide (HarperPerennial).

"I think it's impeccably made Hollywood trash - a watchable, laughable, lamentable soap opera/"women's picture"/"problem" picture....The most honest scene has white Troy Donahue brutally beating date Kohner, who he has learned is black." - Danny Peary, Guide For the Film Fanatic (Fireside).

"Imitation of Life may be the most important movie ever made. It has everything: mother love, musical numbers, backstage intrigue, race relations, gowns by Jean Louis, garish Technicolor, irony, Oscar®-nominated performances. You name it, it's got it!" -- Lypsinka, "My Favorite Things."

Compiled by Frank Miller & Jeff Stafford