Happy [Belated] Birthday To Actress Audrey Totter, She Turned 93 years old... and she Left a Foot-print in Film noir...too!

[deedee gauzot]

• Audrey Mary Totter  in High Wall (1947) with Robert Taylor

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...

Career

“	The bad girls were so much fun to play. I wouldn't have wanted to play Coleen's good-girl parts.	”
—Totter in August 1999[2]

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.^{[citation needed]}

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.^{[citation needed]} Initially MGM paired her opposite some of their biggest stars.^{[citation needed]}

Among her successes were:

• The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) with John Garfield and Lana Turner
• Lady in the Lake (1947) with Robert Montgomery and Jayne Meadows
• The Unsuspected (1947 for Warner Bros.) with Claude Rains
• High Wall (1947) with Robert Taylor
• The Saxon Charm (1948) with Montgomery and Susan Hayward
• Alias Nick Beal (1949) with Ray Milland,
• The Set-Up (1949) with Robert Ryan
• Any Number Can Play (1949) with Clark Gable and Alexis Smith
• Tension (1950) with Richard Basehart.

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 reportedly was dissatisfied with her MGM career, only agreeing to appear in Any Number Can Play after Gable intervened. She worked for Columbia Pictures and 20th Century Fox, for example, FBI Girl (1951), but the quality of her films dropped, and by the end of the 1950s, her career was in decline.^{[citation needed]}

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 Lane Temple, and to Totter, but when the writers failed to feature her character, she left the series.

From 1962–63, she starred as homemaker Alice MacRoberts in the ABC situation comedy television 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 1972–76. Her last acting role was in a 1987 episode of Murder, She Wrote.

Personal life

She was married to Leo Fred, assistant dean of the UCLA School of Medicine from 1953 to his death in 1995; they had one child.^{[citation needed]}

Her granddaughter, Eden Totter, is following in Audrey's footsteps by starting her career as a voice artist.

To See Miss Totter Complete Filmography Just Follow This Link to: actress Audrey Totter's Films