Arlene Francis

Birthday

Oct 20, 1907

Bio: Most famous for her stage and TV work, Arlene Francis had a sporadic screen career as well. An only child, Francis early on adopted an extroverted personality to hide her lack of self-confidence. After attending Finch College in New York City, she decided to give acting a try, accumulating a handful of stage credits before making her screen debut as a "woman of the… More Bio: Most famous for her stage and TV work, Arlene Francis had a sporadic screen career as well. An only child, Francis early on adopted an extroverted personality to hide her lack of self-confidence. After attending Finch College in New York City, she decided to give acting a try, accumulating a handful of stage credits before making her screen debut as a "woman of the streets" in the 1932 Universal horror film Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932). The role called for her to be strung up by her wrists on an embalming rack while clad in a flimsy nightgown -- an image that infuriated her father, who demanded that she head back to New York immediately and stop "demeaning" herself in the movies. She returned to the stage, working with Orson Welles' Mercury Theater and co-starring in such Broadway hits as The Doughgirls in which she stole the show as a garrulous Russian sniper. After playing "herself" in Stage Door Canteen (1943), she once again acted in films in 1948, essaying a character role in All My Sons (1948), her last movie for several years. Plunging headlong into television in 1949, Francis emceed a number of interview, quiz, and human interest programs, and from 1950 until 1967 was a panelist on TV's What's My Line? She also hosted scores of radio programs, wrote several books, and was the peripatetic spokesperson of such charitable causes as the United Cerebral Palsy Fund. At the personal request of director Billy Wilder, she accepted her first screen role in 13 years, playing James Cagney's vitriolic wife in Wilder's One Two Three (1961). Thereafter, she appeared in only two more films, portraying a pregnant middle-ager in Carl Reiner's The Thrill of It All (1963) and a reporter in Wilder's Fedora (1978). In 1946, Arlene Francis married actor Martin Gabel, a union that endured until Gabel's death four decades later. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi