Flirting with Fifties' Fame

What these three women have in common is that they had some brief fame in the 1950's and then disappeared.  One was a good actress who opted for raising her kids away from the glare of Hollywood.  Another was an Oscar-nominated actress whose downward spiral culminated in suicide.  The third was a pretty ingenue who could never break out of that mold.  One other thing they have in common is that you may not have heard of any of them... age-depending.



       Dianne Foster

She was born in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1928 as Olga Helen Laruska, of Ukrainian descent.  She knew from the get-go that she wanted to be an actress and performed as a teenager in school plays and community theater.  As a young adult she moved to Toronto and became one of Canada's top radio performers.  She wound up performing in film and on the stage in England for five years.  

Harry Cohn was impressed with her work in Britain and signed her up with his Columbia Pictures.  Her first good film was the film noir Drive a Crooked Road (1954) as a gangster's moll who is in love with mechanic Mickey Rooney.  She showed a fire that caught my interest enough to see most of her work.

Her characters were always strong.  She excelled as the independent daughter of Barbara Stanwyck and Edward G. Robinson's in The Violent Men (1954) while falling in love with their arch nemesis, Glenn Ford.   

Rooney liked her so much that he recommended her to Burt Lancaster who was looking for an actress to play a spunky pioneer woman in The Kentuckian (1955), as I see it, her best film.  She was equally impressive as Cameron Mitchell's exasperated wife in Monkey on My Back (1957), a bio on WWII hero and champion boxer Barney Ross who became addicted to drugs.

Foster registered as Richard Conte's wife in the mob drama, The Brothers Rico (1957) but had little to do as Jeffrey Hunter's wife in The Last Hurrah (1958) although the Spencer Tracy film was an A picture, widely seen and respected.

I have always questioned whether her formidable personality rubbed someone the wrong way and the movie moguls turned their backs on her.  Whatever happened, she wound up doing a great deal of television and after 1966 she acted no more.  After three divorces and with three children to raise alone, she virtually disappeared.  The last I heard she was still living in California and had become a painter.




      Maggie McNamara

I thought she was adorable with that schoolgirl pixie look and a bright-eyed determination to succeed.  Born in 1928 in New York, McNamara grew up wanting to be a fashion designer and while on the fringes of that profession she began modeling, achieving great success.  She was constantly hearing with your looks you should be an actress and so she began taking classes. 


Those pert, youthful good looks got her on the cover of Life Magazine twice... a heady accomplishment in those days.  The first of those times resulted in director Otto Preminger calling her about a play he was producing on Broadway, The Moon Is Blue.  She got the part.  It was 1951, the same year she married movie director David (Pollyanna, The Parent Trap) Swift.

She was hired to repeat the role in the movie version which brought instant fame because it was the film, with its bold use of words such as seduce, mistress, virgin and pregnant, that turned the faces of the Hollywood watchdogs of morals as blue as that moon.  The production code was forever changed because Preminger released his film anyway, without that seal of approval.  Well, gee, the public flocked to it (truthfully, it's a yawn despite the presence of David Niven and William Holden) and McNamara became an international sensation.  She also managed to cop a best actress Oscar nomination.

Striking while the iron was hot, 20th Century Fox hired her to join Dorothy McGuire and Jean Peters to toss Three Coins in the Fountain (1954).  Lordy, the entire world went to see it and the splendors of Rome and to hear that title song for the 1,000th time.  While the least accomplished of the six leads (Clifton Webb, Louis Jourdan and Rossano Brazzi were the guys), McNamara was just the cutest thing you ever saw.  Her future looked rosy.

But it turned out not to be.  She was always fragile and had serious body image issues.  She turned her back on doing cheesecake photos, to the studio's utter annoyance, but when she steadfastly refused to take part in even a sliver of publicity for Fountain, it was the death knell for her career.  Scores of actresses showed the temperament McNamara did but probably not on their second picture.

She also had a highly-volatile marriage with Swift which was often party chatter on both coasts.  McNamara had an emotional breakdown from which, it's said, she never recovered.  She appeared in only two more films, neither box office shattering, and managed a small role in some play.  There were reports she spent years as a typist in some Manhattan high-rise.  She was found dead in her apartment in February, 1978, a suicide note nearby, four months before her 50th birthday.  





             Lori Nelson

She was blonde, pretty and oh so sunny... a lovely girl-next-door type whose 50's career could only have happened at the studio it did... Universal.  Most all at the studio were very nice to gaze upon, actresses and actors alike, but many, like Nelson, barely lasted the decade and are completely unknown to audiences today.  She had showbiz in her veins, starting out as a child performer, but I suspect she just never had the hunger to make it big.

She was dubbed Santa Fe's Shirley Temple because she sang and danced and tugged at heartstrings all over New Mexico when she was just two and three years old.  Her parents quickly moved her to Hollywood-- no fools they.  A new moniker was installed... Little Miss America... and soon she was entertaining at veteran's hospitals, became a photographer's model and managed a few local stage productions.  

A Universal scout, always on the lookout for those decorative beings, secured a standard seven-year contract and soon the pretty young lass was in a Ma and Pa Kettle flick and a Francis the Talking Mule.  How's that for an auspicious beginning?  It never much improved.

What I will say for Nelson is that she managed to get her pretty face in every movie magazine for years and I would know.  She was voted Hollywood's Most Beautiful Blonde in 1951 by industry makeup men.  She became a serial dater.  If it was Universal's idea that she be over-publicized without doing much work, she must have gone along with it.  Many of her publicized dates were with handsome, gay actors.  The publicity mill had it that she was going to marry Tab Hunter (he said in his bio that he briefly considered it).  She was also every young actress' gal pal.  Nelson knew them all.  Her BFF was Debbie Reynolds with whom she had countless, wholesome things in common except a starry career.

Her best film was her first, Bend of the River (1952), a colorful and exciting western starring James Stewart and filmed in Oregon.  Her best role, however, was arguably as Barbara Stanwyck vivacious daughter in the excellent soaper, All I Desire (1953).  The following year she was used smartly in another western, Destry.  She also showed some spark as the crippled girl in Jack Palance's I Died a Thousand Times (1955), a good remake of High Sierra.

She made 20 films, most of which were awful.  She made her way into a brief television career and married composer-conductor, Johnny Mann, keeping a low profile during their 13-year union.  Ten years later she married a cop and opened up a boutique.  We haven't heard from or about her for years.



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A good 50's film