Source: Jerusalem Post (www.jpost.com) Author: Judy Siegel-Itzkovich Top Hollywood stars in the 1930s and 1940s, among them Clark Gable, Spencer Tracey, Joan Crawford, John Wayne, Bette Davis, Betty Grable and Al Jolson, were paid by tobacco companies up to $75,000 a year (today's value) to promote specific brands of cigarettes, according to a study by US researchers published Thursday morning in the journal Tobacco Control. The companies contracted with actors, actresses and singers and paid them what totaled millions of dollars to endorse the Lucky Strike, Old Gold, Chesterfield and Camel brands of cigarettes - and the performers did it willingly, even though it was already known that tobacco was harmful to health. In all, almost 200 performers took part in the cigarette endorsements, including two-thirds of the top 50 box office Hollywood stars from the late 1930s through the 1940s. The continued presence of on-screen smoking in today's mainstream films is rooted in these "studio era" deals, according to study authors K.L. Lum, J.R. Polansky, R.K. Jackler and S.A. Glantz of the University of California at San Francisco and Stanford University. The research team accessed cigarette endorsement contracts between tobacco companies and studio-controlled movie stars, as well as advertisements of the period, from university and major US newspaper archives. The period under investigation covered the years 1927 to 1951, from the advent of talking motion pictures to the rise of TV. In return for the paid testimonials of their stars in cigarette ads, major studios benefited from nationwide print [...]