| Ilona Massey | |
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Ilona Massey, 1941 |
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| Born | Ilona Hajmássy June 16, 1910 Budapest, Austria – Hungary (now Budapest, Hungary) |
| Died | August 20, 1974 (aged 64) Bethesda, Maryland, U.S. |
| Years active | 1935-1959 |
| Spouse | Nick Szavazd (1935–1936) (divorced) Alan Curtis (1941–1942) (divorced) Charles Walker (1952–1954) (divorced) Maj. Gen. Donald Dawson, USAF (Ret.) (1955–1974) (her death) |
Ilona Massey (born Ilona Hajmássy; June 16, 1910 – August 20, 1974[1]) was a film, stage and radio performer.
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She was born in Budapest, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Hungary). Billed as "the new Dietrich", she starred in three films with Nelson Eddy, including Rosalie (1937), and with Lon Chaney, Jr. in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) as Baroness Frankenstein. In 1943, she appeared in the Ziegfeld Follies.
In 1947, she starred with Eddy in Northwest Outpost, a musical film composed by Rudolf Friml.[2] In 1949, she starred in Love Happy with the Marx Brothers. She played Madame Egelichi, a femme fatale spy, and her performance inspired Milton Caniff in the creation of his femme fatale spy, Madame Lynx, in the comic strip "Steve Canyon". Caniff hired Massey to pose for him.[3]
From 1 November 1954, she hosted DuMont's The Ilona Massey Show, a weekly musical variety show in which she sang songs with guests in a nightclub stage set, with music provided by the Irving Fields Trio. The series lasted through 1955.
Becoming an American citizen in 1946, she remained strongly anti-communist for what she saw as the destruction of her native country, at one point picketing the United Nations during the 1956 visit of Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev.
Ilona Massey died of cancer in Bethesda, Maryland and was buried in Virginia's Arlington National Cemetery near her last husband, Donald Dawson, who had served in the United States Air Force Reserve as a Major General.