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Helen Walker was a beautiful and bright actress whose career never reached its full potential, in spite of her evident talent. She was a successful actress on Broadway, and in 1942 her performance in the play "Jason" was so impressive that she was signed up to act in films. She immediately earned good notice and received star billing in her film debut, Lucky Jordan (1942), starring Alan Ladd. During the mid-1940s she had continued success with strong performances in offbeat but entertaining and successful films like The Man in Half Moon Street (1944), the satirical Brewster's Millions (1945), and the murder spoof Murder, He Says (1945), which starred Fred MacMurray. Achieving both artistic and box office success, she was clearly on the brink of major stardom. She won the starring role in the prestigious film Heaven Only Knows (1947). But all that changed on New Year's Eve of 1946 when she picked up three hitchhiking World War II veterans while driving to Los Angeles from Palm Springs, where she had been vacationing. She had a terrible accident, hitting a divider and wrecking the car, which flipped several times. One of the soldiers died and the other two were severely injured. Walker herself was seriously injured, including a broken pelvis. But her career suffered even greater and longer-lasting damage. The survivors of the accident accused her of driving drunk and speeding, and she was brought to trial. She suffered bad press and faced a public that was grateful to World War II veterans for having won the war, and was replaced in Heaven Only Knows (1947). Although she was acquitted of criminal charges, many fans turned against her and major studios were hesitant to hire her. She tried to adapt by portraying ruthless and manipulative women in dark murder mysteries, in which she again showed great talent. She performed with great aplomb in Nightmare Alley (1947), the gritty urban police drama Call Northside 777 (1948), and Impact (1949), an unconventional murder drama that featured a fatal automobile accident her character helped cause. But she could not overcome the stigma of the veteran's death. By the 1950s, she was reduced to low-budget films that received little notice. After winning a minor role in the Cornel Wilde police drama The Big Combo (1955), her film career ended and she only appeared in a few television shows. In 1960, she made her last television appearance, and that same year her house burned down. Some remaining friends from show business helped her, with some fellow actresses staging a benefit for her, which touched her deeply. She faded from the public view and during the 1960s she experienced health problems. In 1968, she died of cancer. She was 47 years old.- Actress
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Anne Nagel's life could be summed up in two words: pretty miserable. Born to devoutly religious Bostonian parents who had long encouraged her to become a nun, she had been enrolled in a preparatory school for just that purpose. As a young teenager she worked part-time as a photographer's model, and by her mid-teens, she had become more interested in a life in Hollywood than in a convent and had joined a Boston theater company. By this time, her mother had remarried and her new stepfather, a Technicolor expert, had been hired by Tiffany, a bottom-rung Poverty Row studio. The family journeyed to California and Anne's first film experience was in several Technicolor experimental shorts directed by her stepfather. She soon graduated to features as a dancer. Her striking beauty and pleasant voice made her a natural for talkies. She landed a contract at Warner Brothers and made her film debut in 1932, enjoying a string of steady, if unspectacular, roles in lower- and medium-budget pictures. Life began to unravel for her in 1936 when she married Ross Alexander. He committed suicide in 1937, and it affected Nagel deeply. Universal, with whom she was under contract by 1941, placed her in some of its serials and featured her in several of its lower-rank horror pictures and B westerns. She soon left Universal and struck out on her own, but unfortunately, she was able to land roles only at Poverty Row studios such as Republic, Monogram, and the nadir of the film industry, PRC. Ironically, her last film, Armored Car Robbery (1950), a taut, highly regarded little thriller now considered a classic of the genre, was easily the best picture she had done in years, and a good one to go out on. She had married an Army Air Corps officer, James H. Keehan, in 1941, but the marriage was increasingly unhappy and they divorced in 1951. Stories spread about her having an alcohol problem, and she spent the last years of her life virtually penniless. Sadly, she died from cancer on 7/6/66 at only 50.- Actress
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Thespian Betty Field was born in Boston on February 8, 1916, the daughter of a salesman and his wife. Ancestors on her father's side were Mayflower colonists Priscilla and John Alden. Her parents divorced while she was still young and Betty eventually learned to speak Spanish while traveling with her mother to various Spanish-speaking countries during her childhood. Mother and daughter settled in Newton, Massachusetts, after the mother remarried. Betty's passion for the theatre was sparked during her early teens and by 1932 she was enrolled at the American Academy of Dramatic Art. She made her professional debut in a 1933 summer stock production of "The First Mrs. Fraser" and soon was cast in stage roles elsewhere. She even found work in a London theater production of "She Loves Me" in early 1934.
Rather plaintive in appearance with flat but highly distinctive tones, Betty's Broadway debut came about as an understudy in the comedy "Page Miss Glory" in November of 1934, courtesy of George Abbott, in which Betty also had a minor role. Therafter she performed frequently in the comedy mold, and in the service of Abbott, with such delightful plays as "Three Men on a Horse (1935), "Boy Meets Girl" (1936) "Room Service" (1937) and "The Primrose Path (1939), and earning fine reviews for the last two.
After seeing her performance on stage as Henry Aldrich's girlfriend Barbara in "What a Life" (1938), Paramount executives utilized her services when they transferred What a Life (1939) to film. The studio not only liked what they saw but signed her to a seven-year contract. Throughout the 1940s Betty appeared in a variety of leading ingénue and co-star roles. The important part of Mae, the farm girl, in John Steinbeck's classic Of Mice and Men (1939) starring Burgess Meredith and Lon Chaney was an early highlight, although it didn't provide her the necessary springboard for stardom. Part of the problem was that the rather reserved actress tended to shun the Hollywood scene (she still lived quietly with her mother).
While performing for Abbott again on Broadway in "Ring Two" (1939), Betty met the show's playwright Elmer Rice and the couple married in 1942. Their three children, John Alden, Judith and Paul, would appear on occasion with their mother on the summer stock stage. Betty also enhanced husband Rice's plays "Flight to the West" (1940) and "A New Life" (1943), which were designed especially for her.
Betty offered consistent, quality work even when the movies she appeared in met with less-than-stellar reviews. She was afforded the opportunity to work with some of Hollywood's finest leading men, including Fredric March in Victory (1940) and Tomorrow, the World! (1944), John Wayne in The Shepherd of the Hills (1941), Robert Cummings in Flesh and Fantasy (1943) and Joel McCrea in The Great Moment (1944). Tops on the list was her heart-tugging performance as the anguished daughter victimized by father Claude Rains in the classic soaper Kings Row (1942).
She purposely did not renew her Paramount contract at this point and, following another sterling performance in The Southerner (1945), took a long break from camera work. Back on Broadway, she appeared in such distinguished plays as "The Voice of the Turtle" and her husband's "Dream Girl" (Rice also directed) for career sustenance. She won the New York Drama Critics Circle award for the latter in 1946. Her Hedvig in Ibsen's "The Wild Duck" was also critically lauded.
An isolated return to Paramount to play what should have been a career highlight ended up a major disappointment,. While her Daisy Buchanan in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1949) had mixed reviews (some felt she was miscast and not glamorous enough for the part), the movie itself (which was extensively trimmed) and her underwhelming co-star Alan Ladd were also cited as problems. Still a marquee value on Broadway, however, she displayed great range in such fare as "Twelfth Night", "The Rat Race", "Peter Pan" (taking over for Jean Arthur), "The Fourposter" (she and Burgess Meredith replaced Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn) and "Ladies of the Corridor"
Betty's soulful features took on a hardened, careworn veneer by the time she returned to Hollywood in the mid-1950's. Nevertheless, she had a "Field" day as a character player appearing in a number of drab, dressed-down roles. She lent credence to a number of fascinatingly flawed small-town moms and matrons in films, among them cream-of-the-crop hits Picnic (1955), starring Kim Novak, Bus Stop (1956) with Marilyn Monroe and Peyton Place (1957) headlining Lana Turner and Hope Lange. The stage plays "The Seagull", "Waltz of the Toreadors", "Touch of the Poet" and "Separate Tables" also accentuated this newly mature phase of her career.
TV took up a large percentage of Betty's time in the 1950s and 1960s with a number of showcase roles. She continued at a fairly steady pace but without much fanfare (as she preferred). Divorced from Rice in 1956, she married and split from lawyer and criminologist Edwin J. Lukas before settling down permanently with husband/artist Raymond Olivere in 1968. Betty's swan song in films was a small, featured part in Clint Eastwood's Coogan's Bluff (1968) as a floozie type, looking noticeably older than she was. Mixing in such stalwart, brittle roles on stage as Amanda in "The Glass Menagerie" and Birdie in "The Little Foxes", she made one of her last theater appearances in the difficult role of the mother in "The Effect of Gamma Rays on "Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds" in 1971.
Betty suffered a fatal cerebral hemorrhage in Hyannis, Massachusetts in 1973, just as she was about to leave and film The Day of the Locust (1975). Cast in the flashy role of "Big Sister", an evangelist, her part was taken over by Geraldine Page. At age 57, Hollywood lost a somewhat undervalued talent who enjoyed the work more than the stardom that often accompanied it.- Actress
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Edith Fellows was born on May 20, 1923, in Boston, Massachusetts. When she was a year old, she and her father and grandmother moved to Charlotte, North Carolina. As a toddler, Edith was pigeon-toed and had trouble walking, and one doctor suggested that dance lessons might cure this condition. At age four, Edith entered Henderson's School of Dance, where she was spotted by a man claiming to be a talent scout, who told her grandmother that he could get Edith into show business for a fifty-dollar fee. The dance school raised the money, but when Edith and her grandmother arrived in Hollywood, they discovered that the address the man had given them did not exist, and they realized he was a fraud. Stranded in Hollywood with no means to return to North Carolina, Edith's grandmother began doing housework to earn a living. While she worked, she left Edith with a neighbor and her young son. One day Edith was taken along when the neighbor's son had an audition for the film Movie Night (1929), and she ended up getting the part. Although she never become a child star, Edith appeared in many popular films of the 1930s, most notably Pennies from Heaven (1936). She also proved herself to be a very versatile actress, playing roles ranging from a spoiled rich girl, as in Heart of the Rio Grande (1942), to a poor orphan girl, as in Pennies from Heaven. Edith was even given her own series, The Five Little Peppers, while under contract to Columbia, and she made four of the Pepper films (the first was Five Little Peppers and How They Grew (1939)) in two years. Between 1929 and 1954, Edith appeared in some fifty films, mostly in juvenile roles due to her short 4' 10" stature. But her career suddenly slowed down in the mid-1950s. Between 1955 and 1980, she appeared in only one film, Lilith (1964), in which she had a bit part. During this time, Edith chose to focus on her family life; she had married producer Freddie Fields in 1946, and their only child, daughter Kathy, was born in 1947. But Edith and Fields divorced in 1955, and the end of her marriage, coupled with other factors, caused Edith to have a nervous breakdown. She recovered, and in 1981, she returned to acting in numerous supporting roles on television. In 1985, fellow former child actor Jackie Cooper announced plans to make a TV movie based on Edith's life, but this project never happened.- Actress
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She was the standard prototype of the porcelain-pretty collegiate and starry-eyed romantic interest in a host of Depression-era films and although her name may not ring a bell to most, Mary Carlisle enjoyed a fairly solid decade in the cinematic limelight.
The petite Boston-born, blue-eyed blonde was born on February 3, 1914, and brought to Hollywood in 1918, at age 4, by her mother after her father passed away. The story goes that the 14-year-old and her mother were having lunch at the Universal commissary when she was noticed by producer Carl Laemmle Jr., who immediately gave her a screen test. Her age was a hindering factor, however, and Mary completed her high school studies before moving into the acting arena. An uncle connected to MGM helped give the young hopeful her break into the movies as a singer/dancer a few years later.
Mary started out typically as an extra and bit player in such films as Madam Satan (1930), The Great Lover (1931) and in Grand Hotel (1932) in which she played a honeymooner. The glamorous, vibrant beauty's career was given a build-up as a "Wampas Baby Star" in 1933 and soon she began finding work in films playing stylish, well-mannered young co-eds. Although she performed as a topline actress in a number of lightweight pictures such as Night Court (1932) with Anita Page, Murder in the Private Car (1934) starring Charles Ruggles, and It's in the Air (1935) alongside Jack Benny, she is perhaps best remembered as a breezy co-star to Bing Crosby in three of his earlier, lightweight '30s musicals: College Humor (1933), Double or Nothing (1937) and Doctor Rhythm (1938). In the last picture mentioned she is the lovely focus of his song "My Heart Is Taking Lessons". Her participation in weightier material such as Kind Lady (1935) was often overshadowed by her even weightier co-stars, in this case Basil Rathbone and Aline MacMahon.
Disappointed with the momentum of her career and her inability to extricate herself from the picture-pretty, paragon-of-virtue stereotype, Mary traveled and lived in London for a time in the late '30s. Following her damsel-in-distress role in the horror opus Dead Men Walk (1943) with George Zucco and Dwight Frye, Mary retired from the screen, prompted by her marriage to James Blakeley, a flying supervisor, the year before. The Beverly Hills couple had one son. Her husband, a former actor who also appeared in '30s musicals with Crosby as a dapper second lead (e.g., in Two for Tonight (1935)), later became an important executive (producer, editor, etc.) at Twentieth Century-Fox.
In later years Mary managed an Elizabeth Arden Salon in Beverly Hills and received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Her husband passed away in 2007. Mary herself lived to the ripe old age of 104 on August 1, 2018.- Actress
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Linda Watkins was born on 23 May 1908 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. She was an actress, known for The Parent Trap (1961), From Hell It Came (1957) and Route 66 (1960). She was married to Gabriel Lorie Hess. She died on 31 October 1976 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Actress
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Massachusetts-born Jean Rogers had hoped to study art in New York and Europe upon graduation from high school, but her plans changed when she won a national beauty contest in 1933 and was offered a contract by a Hollywood producer. She was soon signed by Warner Bros., and a year later jumped ship to Universal. She began appearing in several of the studios' serials, with 1936's "Flash Gordon" being her most fondly remembered role. Given her delicate blond beauty and the skimpy outfits she wore, it was no wonder she was lusted after so fiercely by archvillain Ming the Merciless (and most of the male audience). Universal took her out of the serial unit and put her in a string of B pictures. Unsatisfied with the way her career was going, and the fact that the studio refused to give her a raise, she left Universal for 20th Century Fox in 1939. Two years later the spunky Rogers left Fox for the same reasons she left Universal, and signed with MGM, where she found the treatment more to her liking. She walked off the Culver City lot in 1943 when studio boss Louis B. Mayer discovered that she planned to get married, and forbade her to do so. Althugh she freelanced over the next few years, nothing much really came of it, and after making "The Second Woman" in 1951, she retired to raise her family.- Actress
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Priscilla Lane attended the Eagin School of Dramatic Arts in New York before she began touring with her sisters in the Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians Dance Band. She was a popular singer with her sisters and, after 5 years, she was signed to a Hollywood contract with Warner Brothers in 1937. Her first film was Varsity Show (1937) where she had the hard task of portraying a singer with the Fred Waring Band. Priscilla was to play the nice girl against the temperamental star played by her sister Rosemary Lane. Over the years, Priscilla would play an assortment of girlfriends, daughters and fiancees. She would team with her two sisters, Rosemary Lane and Lola Lane, to make a series of dramas beginning with the film Four Daughters (1938). That film would be the one that made John Garfield a star. In most of her films, all Priscilla had to do was to look attractive and give a good supporting performance. Priscilla would also co-star with Wayne Morris in three 1938 releases. In The Roaring Twenties (1939), she would play the girlfriend of James Cagney. In Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), which was released 3 years after it was filmed, she would play the fiancee of Cary Grant. When Alfred Hitchcock was unable to get Barbara Stanwyck, he cast Priscilla in Saboteur (1942) where she was on the run with the hero. By that time, her movie career was almost finished and she would appear in just a couple of films over the next five years before retiring in 1948.- Actress
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Ruth Roman was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, the youngest of three daughters of Lithuanian-Jewish parents Mary Pauline (Gold) and Abraham Roman. Her father, a carnival barker, died when she was a small child, forcing her mother to support the family by working as a waitress and cleaning woman. Ruth grew up in the poor tenement district of Boston, Massachusetts, where she went to school. However, she left school after just two years to pursue an acting career. Her chosen path proved to be strewn with obstacles: in New York, she obtained a job posing for stills for a crime magazine, but theatrical work eluded her. She then worked as a hat check girl at a night club before calling it quits and returning to Boston. There, she made ends meet as an usherette during the day while at night performing with the New England Repertory Company, her first steady acting job. She also studied drama and eventually graduated from the Bishop-Lee Theatre School.
Trying to get into films, Ruth unsuccessfully made the rounds of agents and producers for two years (1940-42), until a bit part as a WAVE came her way in the film Stage Door Canteen (1943). With $200 to her name, she purchased a one-way ticket to Hollywood, where she found shared accommodation with other aspiring starlets, naming it, optimistically, 'the House of the Seven Garbos'. After a screen test with Warner Brothers failed to result in a contract, Ruth had another run of six hard years playing bit parts, many of them uncredited, some ending up on the cutting room floor. A sole speaking part of consequence was in the titular role of Jungle Queen (1945), a Universal serial (after subsequent acting lessons, Ruth was aghast when the serial was rereleased in 1951).
Ruth finally got her big break when producer Dore Schary cast her (against character, as a murderess) in the RKO thriller The Window (1949). That same year, she successfully auditioned for Stanley Kramer's boxing drama Champion (1949) as the dependable wife of the fighter (Kirk Douglas). After this turning point in her life, the shapely, smoky-voiced brunette secured a contract with Warner Brothers. During the next phase of her career, she moved effortlessly from glamorous and seductive to demure and wholesome in films opposite stars like James Stewart, Errol Flynn, and Gary Cooper. Look Magazine billed her as the 'Big Time Movie Personality of 1950', and by the following year she was receiving some 500 fan letters per week.
While many of her leads were in westerns (albeit mostly A-grade ones), Ruth was somewhat more memorable in support of Farley Granger (as his upper-crust lover and the raison d'etre for the planned murder of his wife) in Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951). Another offbeat role was as a gangster's moll in the British-made updated adaptation of Shakespeare's Joe MacBeth (1955). As Lily, she is the power behind angst-ridden Paul Douglas ('Joe'), whom she easily manipulates to do her bidding. In The Bottom of the Bottle (1956), she was at her dependable best as the supportive wife of lawyer Joseph Cotten. Arguably, her last noteworthy performance on the big screen was in Alexander Singer's romance/drama Love Has Many Faces (1965).
By the 1960s, Ruth had made the transition to middle-aged character parts and began to appear mostly on television in shows like The Outer Limits (1963), Mannix (1967), Gunsmoke (1955), and (in a recurring role) in The Long, Hot Summer (1965). She also toured nationally with theatrical productions of "Plaza Suite", "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf", and "Two for the Seesaw". For the actress, who was said to disdain the trimmings of Hollywood stardom, real-life drama came when she and her son counted among the 760 survivors of the sinking of the luxury cruise liner 'Andrea Doria' in 1956. In September 1967, she jumped from her burning car but still managed to make her scheduled performance in "Beekman Place" at the Ivanhoe Theatre. Ruth died in September 1999 at her home in Laguna Beach, aged 76.- Actress
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She was born Edna May Nutter, a child of solid New England stock, on 9th November 1883 in Malden, Massachusetts. The daughter of Ida May and Charles Edward Nutter, Edna was a descendant of the 2nd American president John Adams and his son, the 6th American president John Quincy Adams. In addition, her father's stepfather, Samuel Oliver, had a mother named Julia Adams who was descended from another John Adams (born 1724). Miss Oliver took an early interest in the stage, and she would quit school at the age of 14 to pursue her ambitions in the theater. Despite abandoning traditional schooling, Edna continued to study the performing arts, including speech and piano. One of her first jobs was as pianist with an all female orchestra which toured America around the turn of the century. By 1917 she had achieved success on Broadway in the hit play "Oh, Boy". By 1923 she had appeared in her first film. Edna May Oliver seems to have been born to play the classics of American and British literature. Some of her most memorable film roles were in adaptations of works of Charles Dickens. Although some have described her as plain or "horse faced", Edna May Oliver's comedic talents lent a beautiful droll warmth to her characters. She was usually called upon to play less glamorous roles such as a spinsters, but she played them with such soul, wit, and depth that to this day she remains one of the best loved of Hollywood's character actresses. A fine example of her comedic talent can be found in Laugh and Get Rich (1931). Here we find her playing a role almost autobiographical in nature, that of a proud woman with Boston roots who has married "down". As the plot unwinds, she is invited to a society gala despite her modest circumstances. At the gala she becomes tipsy. With a frolicsome air Edna May seems to use the role to gently mock her real self. Her slightly drunk character seizes upon a bit of flattery, and alluding to her old New England family, proudly proclaims to each who will listen, "I am a Cranston. That explains everything!". In real life, Edna May Oliver was a Nutter, and perhaps that explains everything. Edna May Oliver married stock broker David Pratt in 1928, but the marriage ended in divorce five years later. In 1939 she received an Oscar nomination for her supporting role as Widow McKlennar in the picture Drums Along the Mohawk (1939). That was to be one of her last films. Miss Oliver was struck ill in August of 1942. Although she seemed to recover briefly, she was re-admitted to Los Angeles's Cedars of Lebanon hospital in October Her dear friend actress Virginia Hammond flew out from New York to stay by her bedside. Edna May Oliver died on her 59th birthday, 9th November 1942. Virginia Hammond was with her and said, "She died without ever being aware of the gravity of her condition. She just went peacefully asleep."- Actress
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Thelma Todd was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, an industrial city near the New Hampshire state line. She was a lovely child with good academic tendencies, so much so that she decided early on to become a schoolteacher. After high school she went on to college but at her mother's insistence entered several beauty contests (apparently her mother wanted her to be more than just a "schoolmarm"). Thelma was so successful in these endeavors that she entered on the state level and won the title of "Miss Massachusetts" in 1925 and went on to the "Miss America" pageant; though she didn't win, the pageant let her be seen by talent scouts looking for fresh new faces to showcase in films. She began to appear in one- and two-reel shorts, mostly comedy, which showcased her keen comic timing and aptitude for physical comedy--unusual in such a beautiful woman.
She had been making shorts for Hal Roach when she was signed to Paramount Pictures. Her first role--at age 21--was as Lorraine Lane in 1927's Fascinating Youth (1926), a romantic comedy that was Paramount's showcase vehicle for its new stars. Thelma received minor billing in another film that year, God Gave Me Twenty Cents (1926). The next year she starred with Gary Cooper and William Powell in the western Nevada (1927). That year also saw her in three more films, with The Gay Defender (1927) being the most notable. It starred Richard Dix as a man falsely accused of murder.
As the 1920s closed, Thelma began to get parts in more and more films. In 1928 and 1929 alone she was featured in 20 pictures, and not just comedies--she also did dramas and gothic horror films. Unlike many silent-era stars whose voices didn't fit their image or screen persona, Thelma's did. She had a bright, breezy, clear voice with a pleasant trace of a somewhat-aristocratic but unsnobbish New England accent and easily made the transition to sound films. In 1930 she added 14 more pictures to her resume, with Dollar Dizzy (1930) and Follow Thru (1930) being the most notable. The latter was a musical with Thelma playing a rival to Nancy Carroll for the affections of Buddy Rogers. It was a box-office hit, as was the stage production on which it was based. The following year Thelma appeared in 14 more films, among them Let's Do Things (1931), Speak Easily (1932), The Old Bull (1932), and On the Loose (1931). Her most successful film that year, however, was the Marx Brothers farce Monkey Business (1931). While critics gave the film mixed reviews, the public loved it. In 1932 Thelma appeared in another Marx Brothers film directed by Norman Z. McLeod, Horse Feathers (1932). She also starred in This Is the Night (1932), a profitable film which featured Cary Grant in his first major role. In 1934 Thelma made 16 features, but her career would soon soon come to a grinding halt. In 1935 she appeared in such films as Twin Triplets (1935) and The Misses Stooge (1935), showcasing her considerable comic talents. She also proved to be a savvy businesswoman with the opening of "Thelma Todd's Sidewalk Café", a nightclub/restaurant that catered to show-business people. Unfortunately, it also attracted some shady underworld types as well, and there were rumors that they were trying to take over her club and use it as a gambling establishment to fleece the wealthy Hollywood crowd. According to these tales, Thelma and her boyfriend, director Roland West, wouldn't sell their establishment once they found out what the gangsters had in mind, which incurred the enmity of the wrong people with whom to have differences of opinion. Whether or not the stories were true, on December 16, 1935, 29-year-old Thelma was found dead in her car in her garage in Los Angeles. Her death was ruled suicide-by-carbon-monoxide-poisoning. At the time, as today, many felt that her death was actually a murder connected to the goings-on at her club, a theory that was lent credence by the fact that no one who knew her had ever seen her depressed or morose enough to worry about her committing suicide. Another factor that aroused suspicion was that her death was given a cursory investigation by the--at the time--notoriously corrupt Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office and the case was quickly and unceremoniously closed. Her death has remained controversial to this day.
Three films she made before her death weren't released until the following year: Hot Money (1936), An All American Toothache (1936), and The Bohemian Girl (1936). The latter saw her quite substantial role cut down so much that she was barely glimpsed in the picture. Thelma had made an amazing 115 films in such a short career, and her beauty and talent would no doubt have taken her right to the top if not for her untimely demise.- Actress
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Born in Boston, Veda Ann Borg was a New York model in 1936 when a screen test brought her a short-lived contract at Paramount, where she made her debut film, Three Cheers for Love (1936). She fit better at Warner Brothers, where she played at least 15 roles (some of them bits) in 1937-38; but in 1939 a severe auto crash, requiring full facial reconstruction by plastic surgery, interrupted her career. Still attractive, she freelanced through the 1940s, often at "poverty row" studios like Monogram. In many of her films (both before and after the accident) she played a brassy, man-hungry, lower-class sexpot. Despite considerable talent, she received leading roles only in a few B films like What a Blonde (1945). Veda could make the smallest bit part memorable, though, with one line or a bit of business. Who could forget the sassy once-over she gives Wayne Morris in Kid Galahad (1937) or her "modderen singer of modderen songs" in The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947). Her later roles were more varied, from a zombie to Blind Nell (a memorable last role) in The Alamo (1960). Veda's second marriage (1946-1958), to director Andrew V. McLaglen, produced three children: Mary McLaglen, Josh McLaglen, and Andrew Victor McLaglen II. She died of cancer in Hollywood at age 58 after at least 100 film roles.- Actress
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Mary Castle was born on 22 January 1931 in Pampa, Texas, USA. She was an actress, known for The Lawless Breed (1952), Stories of the Century (1954) and Gunsmoke (1953). She was married to Edward Frezza, Wayne Cote and William Grant. She died on 29 April 1998 in Palm Springs, California, USA.- Eve McVeagh was an American actress of film, television, stage, and radio. Born in Ohio, McVeagh moved to Los Angeles in 1923, where she started acting in theater in her teens. McVeagh's film and television career spanned 41 years, and stage career 52 years. McVeagh's roles included leading and supporting parts but she was a fixture in smaller character roles. She is best defined as a versatile workhorse actress of all acting mediums.
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Rita Johnson was born on 8/13/13 in Worcester Ma. She attended the New England Conservatory of Music, did summer stock, then moved on to Broadway in 1935. She was an extremely versatile actress, who played virtually every type of role. Unfortunately, her career came to a halt in 1948 after a hair dryer fell on her head, causing brain damage. Brain surgery was performed, but thereafter her screen time was very limited. She died in Los Angeles County General Hospital on Oct. 31, 1965. Miss Johnson was only 52 years old.- Actress
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Shaye Cogan was born on 20 September 1923 in Hudson, Massachusetts, USA. She was an actress, known for Jack and the Beanstalk (1952), Comin' Round the Mountain (1951) and Mister Rock and Roll (1957). She died on 12 June 2009 in Modesto, California, USA.