Sheila Browning
Sheila Browning (18 November 1916 - ), also known as Sheila Garrett, was an American dancer and film actress.
Career
Sheila Browning was born Bonnie B. Garrett in Marionville, Missouri, USA, on 18 November 1916. Her parents were Albert A. Garrett and Lucy C. French. Browning was one of the 30 beautiful "Ziegfeld Girls" in the lavish and expensive film production The Great Ziegfeld.
Family life
In 1934 Browning (then aged 17) met actor Henry Wilcoxon in Hollywood. She was known to friends as "Bonnie" when she was introduced to Wilcoxon by her elder sister Lynn. Wilcoxon disliked her stage name "Browning", preferring her born name "Garrett". After the premiere of The Great Ziegfeld in Los Angeles, she married Wilcoxon, at the Beverly Hills home of his friends Heather Angel and her husband Ralph Forbes, on 28 June 1936.[1] They travelled to Egypt in May of the next year, and in London they saw friends and members of his family. They had booked seats for the coronation of George VI in Westminster Abbey, but did not attend as Wilcoxon had to return to Hollywood for retakes of Souls at Sea. Soon after enjoying a large and lavish party at their Malibu Canyon home, among others attended by her sister Lynn Browning, Henry's brother Robert Owen Wilcoxon, and actors Fred MacMurray, Ray Milland, Colin Tapley, Ralph Forbes and Heather Angel, Browning sued for divorce, stating "Both Henry and I have known for some time this would never work out". They were divorced on 2 July 1937, when her age was listed as '19'.[2]
Henry Wilcoxon said that when Sheila Browning contacted him late in 1940, she announced that she was a good pilot and an army flying instructor. Henry compared her appearance then, in army kit and hair cut short "in the best military fashion", with her appearance when they were married: "...long titian hair and bee-stung lips."[3]
In 1946 Browning married George Alfred Moszkowski, born in Warsaw and 20 years her senior, at the US Embassy in Habana, and they lived in Cuba before they settled down in New Jersey. She later lived in a flat in Chelsea, London, but did return to the USA before her husband died in 1952, after which she reverted her name to Sheila Garrett.
Selected filmography
- The Great Ziegfeld (1936) as Ziegfeld Girl (uncredited)
References
Bibliography
- Wilcoxon, Henry; Orrison, Katherine (1991). Lionheart in Hollywood: the autobiography of Henry Wilcoxon. Metuchen, NJ and London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc. ISBN 0-8108-2476-0.