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Eleanor Parker

Eleanor Parker

Birthday: 1922-06-26 | Place of Birth: Cedarville, Ohio, USA

Eleanor Jean Parker was born on June 26, 1922, in Cedarville, Ohio, the last of three children born to a mathematics teacher and his wife. Eleanor caught the acting bug early and began performing in school plays. She was was so serious about becoming a thespian, she attended the Rice Summer Theatre on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts beginning when she was 15 years old. She was offered her first screen-test by a 20th Century-Fox talent scout while attending Rice, but turned the opportunity down to gain professional stage experience in Cleveland after graduating from high school. She moved on to California to continue her acting studies at the Pasadena Playhouse. It was there, while sitting in the audience of a play being put on at the Playhouse, she was again offered a screen-test -- this time from a Warner Brothers' scout -- and again declined, wanting to finish her first year at the Playhouse. When the year was up, Eleanor contacted Warner Brothers to take them up their offer of a screen-test, and was signed as a contract player two days after it was shot. Her beauty meant she was not forgotten, and she was cast in one of Warner Brothers' biggest productions for the 1943 season, the pro-Soviet Mission to Moscow (1943) directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Walter Huston as the U.S. ambassador to the U.S.S.R. Eleanor played his daughter in the film, which became notorious in the McCarthy era for its glorification of "Uncle Joe" Stalin. The film proved significant to Eleanor as she met a future husband on the set, Navy Lieutenant. Fred L. Losse, Navy dentist. The marriage was a brief war-time affair, lasting from March 21, 1943, to December 5, 1944. Parker received the first of her three Best Actress Oscar nominations playing a prisoner in Caged (1950), for which she won the best actress award at the Venice Film Festival. She was also nominated the next year playing the cop's wife who shared a secret with the neighborhood abortionist in William Wyler's Detective Story (1951). Her third and last Oscar nod came for Interrupted Melody (1955), playing an opera singer struck down by polio. She could easily have been nominated that same year for her portrayal of Frank Sinatra's faux crippled wife in Otto Preminger's brooding masterpiece The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) adapted from the novel by Nelson Algren. Parker proved herself to be a supremely talented and very versatile lead actress. The versatility was likely one of the reasons why she never quite became a major star. Audiences attending a movie which starred Parker never knew quite what to expect of her; if they even remembered she was the same actress, they had seen before in a different type of role in another picture. Her turns in Detective Story (1951) and The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) could not have been more different. Parker's stardom and subsequent fame (and remembrance) suffered from her focusing on being a serious actress and creating a character who fit the motion picture she was in, rather than playing a character again and again and again as most movie stars do. She is probably best remembered for the relatively tame part as the Baroness in The Sound of Music (1965).

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Known For

Acting

Year
Title

Role

1991
Dead on the Money

as    Catherine Blake

1979
Sunburn

as    Mrs. Thoren

1979
She's Dressed to Kill

as    Regine Danton

1978
The Bastard

as    Lady Amberly

1974
Home for the Holidays

as    Alexandra Morgan

1973
The Great American Beauty Contest

as    Peggy Lowery

1971
Vanished

as    Sue Greer

1969
Eye of the Cat

as    Aunt Danny

1968
How to Steal the World

as    Margitta Kingsley

1967
The Tiger and the Pussycat

as    Mme Vincenzini

1967
Warning Shot

as    Mrs. Doris Ruston

1965
The Sound of Music

as    Baroness Elsa von Schraeder

1961
Return to Peyton Place

as    Connie Rossi

1960
Home from the Hill

as    Hannah Hunnicutt

1959
A Hole in the Head

as    Eloise Rogers

1956
The King and Four Queens

as    Sabina McDade

1955
Interrupted Melody

as    Marjorie Lawrence

1955
Many Rivers to Cross

as    Mary Stuart Cherne

1955
The Man with the Golden Arm

as    Zosch Machine

1954
Valley of the Kings

as    Ann Barclay Mercedes

1953
Escape from Fort Bravo

as    Carla Forester

1953
Above and Beyond

as    Lucey Tibbets

1952
Scaramouche

as    Lenore

1951
Detective Story

as    Mary McLeod

1950
Chain Lightning

as    Joan "Jo" Holloway

1950
Caged

as    Marie Allen

1950
Three Secrets

as    Susan Chase

1948
The Woman in White

as    Laura Fairlie / Ann Catherick

1947
Escape Me Never

as    Fenella MacLean

1947
The Voice of the Turtle

as    Sally Middleton