| Audrey Totter | |
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from the trailer for The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) |
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| Born | Audrey Mary Totter December 20, 1918 Joliet, Illinois, USA |
| Years active | 1945–1987 |
| Spouse | Leo Fred; 1 child |
Audrey Mary Totter (born December 20, 1918,[1] Joliet, Illinois) is an American actress and former Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract star of Austrian-Slovene and Swedish descent.
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| “ | The bad girls were so much fun to play. I wouldn't have wanted to play Coleen's good-girl parts. | ” |
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—Totter in August 1999[2] |
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Totter began her acting career in radio in the late 1930s and after success in Chicago and New York, was signed to a seven-year film contract with MGM.
She made her film debut in Main Street After Dark (1945) and during the 1940s established herself as a popular female lead. Although she appeared in various film genres, she became most widely known to movie audiences in film noir productions. Initially MGM paired her opposite some of their biggest stars.
Among her successes were:
By the early 1950s, the tough-talking "dames" she was best known for portraying were no longer fashionable, and as MGM began to work towards creating more family-themed films, Totter was released from her contract. She was reported to have grown dissatisfied with MGM's handling of her career, only agreeing to appear in Any Number Can Play after Gable intervened. She worked for Columbia Pictures and 20th Century Fox, for example in 1951's FBI Girl, but the quality of her films dropped, and by the end of the 1950s, her career was in decline.
In 1954, she appeared in the pilot episode of the later 1957-1958 detective series, Meet McGraw with Frank Lovejoy.[3] She appeared with Joseph Cotten and William Hopper in the 1957 episode "The Case of the Jealous Bomber" of NBC's anthology series, The Joseph Cotten Show. In 1958, she played boarding house owner Beth Purcell in the NBC western series Cimarron City. The episodes were supposed to have rotated from star George Montgomery as mayor, John Smith as blacksmith/deputy sheriff, and to Totter, but when the writers failed to feature her character, she left the series.
During 1962 and 1963, she starred as homemaker Alice MacRoberts in the ABC situation comedy series Our Man Higgins, with Stanley Holloway in the lead role as an English butler to a suburban American family. She played a continuing role, that of Nurse Wilcox, the efficient head nurse, in the television series Medical Center from 1972 until 1976 and her most recent television appearance was in a 1987 episode of Murder, She Wrote.
She was married to Leo Fred, assistant dean of the UCLA School of Medicine from 1953 to his death in 1995. She had dated Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Lew Ayres and Robert Walker in her Hollywood years.