Audrey Mary Totter (December 20, 1917 – December 12, 2013) was an American radio, film, and television actress and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract player in the 1940s.
Early life
Audrey – some sources indicate "Audra" – Totter was born in 1917[2][3][4] and grew up in Joliet in Will County in northeastern Illinois. Her parents were John Totter, who was born in Slovenia with birth name Janez, and Ida Mae Totter. Her father was of Austro-Slovenian descent and her mother was Swedish American. She had two brothers, Folger and George, and a sister, Collette.
Totter graduated from Joliet High School, where she acted in school plays. She was a Methodist who began her career performing in several productions for her local church, as well as being involved with the YWCA players.[5]
Totter began her acting career in radio in the late 1930s in Chicago, only 40 miles northeast of Joliet. She played in soap operas, including Painted Dreams, Ma Perkins, and Bright Horizon. She created the role of Millie Bronson in the radio show Meet Millie, a situation comedy about a wisecracking Manhattan secretary from Brooklyn. The radio series began on CBS July 2, 1951, continuing until September 23, 1954. Totter dropped out when her film studio refused to allow her to appear as the character on television.
Film
Following success in Chicago and New York City, Totter was signed to a seven-year film contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). She made her film debut in Main Street After Dark (1945) and established herself as a popular female lead in the 1940s. Due to Totter's limited skill as a singer, MGM used Harriet Lee as her voice double in the 1945 film Dangerous Partners.[6] Although she performed in various film genres, she became most widely known to movie audiences for her work in film noir.[7] Looking back, Totter stated in August 1999, "The bad girls were so much fun to play. I wouldn't have wanted to play the Coleen Gray good-girl parts."[8]
By the early 1950s, the tough-talking "dames" she was best known for portraying were no longer fashionable, and as MGM began streamlining its roster of contract players and worked towards creating more family-themed films, Totter was released from her contract. She reportedly was dissatisfied with her MGM career and agreed to appear in Any Number Can Play only after Clark Gable intervened. After leaving MGM, she worked for Columbia Pictures and 20th Century Fox, but the quality of her films dropped, and by the late 1950s, her film career was in decline, though she continued to work steadily for television.
Later in 1958, Totter played boarding house owner Beth Purcell in another NBC Western series, Cimarron City. The episodes were supposed to rotate among star George Montgomery as the mayor, John Smith as blacksmith/deputy sheriff Lane Temple, and Totter, but when the writers failed to feature her character, she left the series.
Totter had a continuing role from 1972 to 1976, playing Nurse Wilcox, the efficient head nurse, in the CBS television series Medical Center, with James Daly and Chad Everett. Her last acting role was as a nun, Sister Paul, in a 1987 episode ("Old Habits Die Hard") of CBS's Murder, She Wrote, with Angela Lansbury.
Personal life and death
Totter was married to Dr. Leo Fred,[9] assistant dean of the UCLA School of Medicine, from 1953 until his death in 1995. The couple had one child, a daughter.
^Most references cite 1918 as her year of birth but Intelius indicates the year was 1917, as do Ancestry.com's United States census records, which give her age in April 1930 as 12 years old, and in January 1920 (see below) as two years old
^Year: 1920 Census Place: Joliet Ward 1, Will, Illinois Roll: T625_416 Page: 2A Enumeration District: 185 Image: 109 Ancestry.com. 1920 United States Federal Census [database on-line] Provo, UT, US: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2010. Images reproduced by FamilySearch. Original data: Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920. (NARA microfilm publication T625, 2076 rolls). Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29 National Archives, Washington, D.C. For details on the contents of the film numbers, visit the following NARA web page: NARA. Note: Enumeration Districts 819-839 are on roll 323 (Chicago City)
^"An Interview With Audrey Totter", Skip E. Lowe, 1989.
