Dianne Foster
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Dianne Foster | |
 Dianne Foster |
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| Birth name | Diane Laruska |
| Born | October 31, 1928 Edmonton Alberta, Canada |
| Height | 5ft 6 |
Foster is of Ukrainian descent and began her acting career at the age of 13 in a stage adaptation of James Barrie's What Every Woman Knows. At 14 she began a radio career and subsequently moved to Toronto and became one of Canada's top radio stars. In 1951 she went to London, England for a holiday and after meeting and marrying Andrew Allen, drama supervisor for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, she decided to stay. Foster appeared onstage in Agatha Christie's The Hollow and Orson Welles's Othello that same year. In March of 1952 her husband returned to Canada while she stayed in London to honour her five-year contract with a British film company.
In 1953 she co-starred alongside Charlton Heston and Lizabeth Scott in the middling Bad for Each Other. In 1954 she was signed by Columbia Pictures and relocated to Hollywood where her first appearance proper was the same year alongside Mickey Rooney in the well-received Drive a Crooked Road.
Foster's marriage was effectively over before she left for the U.S. and in '54 she married Joel A. Murcott, a Hollywood radio-television scriptwriter during location filming for The Kentuckian. At 39 he was 14 years older than her and both had been married previously.
1955 was a big year for Foster, she appeared on the cover of Picturegoer and co-starred in two big films, Glenn Ford's The Bandits and Burt Lancaster's The Kentuckian.
On 14 February 1956 she gave birth to twins, a son Jason and a daughter Jodi. Although her film career continued, it was not on the same upward trajectory as before. 1957 saw her co-star in the biopic Monkey on my Back, Night Passage with James Stewart and The Brothers Rico with Richard Conte. The same year she also filed for divorce from Murcott claiming he struck her in the face and kicked her in the stomach. She asked for custody and $1 token alimony. The couple temporarily reconciled but it proved to be temporary as they separated two more times before finally divorcing in 1959 with Foster being awarded $250 a month child support. It was the third time she had filed for divorce and she gave her age as 24, though she was infact 31.
In 1958 she had starred with Alan Ladd in The Deep Six and that same year she appeared alongside Jack Hawkins in Gideon of Scotland Yard before her last really big picture The Last Hurrah. It featured an all-star cast including Spencer Tracy, Pat O'Brien and Basil Rathbone and was nominated for two BAFTA awards.
There was a three year absence before she returned to the screen for the next time in King of the Roaring 20's - The Story of Arnold Rothstein. In the meantime she had married Dr. Harold Rowe, a Van Nuys dentist. On 14 November 1963 her son Dustin Louis was born in Los Angeles. In the same year she made her last film appearance in the Dean Martin vehicle Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed?.
Foster continued to appear in television shows, as she had throughout her career, before retiring from showbusiness in 1966 to concentrate on raising her three children. She still lives in California and is an accomplished pianist and painter.
