Short Biography

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.

She was cast in Raoul Walsh`s They Died with Their Boots On (1941), but her performance was left on the cutting room floor. She was then cast in short-subjects and given other assignments typically of tyro movie actors to enable them to learn their craft, such as voice-overs and appearing in other actors` screen tests. Finally, she was promoted to the B-picture unit, making her feature debut in Busses Roar (1942).

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.

She went back to the Bs with The Mysterious Doctor (1943), then bounced back to the A-list for Between Two Worlds (1944), a remake of the Leslie Howard vehicle Outward Bound (1930) in which she played Paul Henreid`s fiancé. (Both were dead from suicide, but in Hollywood logic, that didn`t mean they couldn`t gambol together on the silver screen.) Eleanor then made two more "B" quickies in 1944, Crime by Night (1944), and The Last Ride (1944) before graduating to the A-list for good with Pride of the Marines (1945) with John Garfield.

In an Warner Brothers remake, she took over the role Bette Davis had made good in (ironically, at rival R.K.O.) in the 1946 remake Of Human Bondage (1946). Though Parker would be gaining kudos and Oscar nominations by the beginning of the next decade, her portrait of the slut Mildred was weak in comparison with Davis` dynamic performance.

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 nominate

Miscellaneous Information

Measurements

Bust: 36" -  Waist: 6-"  Hips: 36"

Friends and Family

Andrea King [Friend]

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