Carol Forman

Birthday: Jun 19, 1918

Bio: "I liked being the heavy," Carol Forman stated in 1984. "Not everyone can be as convincing as I am." And it was as a "heavy" -- or rather as "Queen of Serial Villainesses" -- that this brunette starlet will be remembered. The former Carolyn Rawls earned a contract with RKO after essaying a bit part as a rather disagreeable employment adviser in From This Day… More Bio: "I liked being the heavy," Carol Forman stated in 1984. "Not everyone can be as convincing as I am." And it was as a "heavy" -- or rather as "Queen of Serial Villainesses" -- that this brunette starlet will be remembered. The former Carolyn Rawls earned a contract with RKO after essaying a bit part as a rather disagreeable employment adviser in From This Day Forward (1946) and she was henceforth typecast as vixens. RKO, however, foolishly let her go after a couple of B-Westerns and, freelancing, she embarked on her legendary career as a pulp fiction menace playing the title role in The Black Widow, a 1947 action serial that she completely stole from phlegmatic star Bruce Edwards and nominal heroine Virginia Lindley. Columbia's 15-chapter Brick Bradford (1947), starring Kane Richmond and featuring Forman as nasty Queen Khana followed, and if the role was little more than a bit, the opportunity led to her being cast as The Spider Lady in the studio's Superman (1948). This time, she stole a reducer ray gun that eventually proved something of a boomerang. Kirk Alyn starred as the man of steel and they were re-teamed by Republic in Federal Agents vs. Underworld, Inc. (1949), he playing a G-Man and she portraying Nila, a rather homicidal femme fatale with a desire to dominate the world through crime. She appeared opposite Alyn a third and final time in Columbia's Blackhawk (1952), but by then the serial era was coming to a close and budgets were plummeting. In between the chapterplays, Forman portrayed equally unsavory characters in a couple of B-movies, including Docks of New Orleans (1948), a Charlie Chan entry from Monogram, and did her fair share of television: The Cisco Kid, 77 Sunset Strip, and The Files of Jeffrey Jones. Retiring to marry television director William Dennis, Forman returned to the limelight in the 1980s as a popular guest speaker at various classic film festivals. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, Rovi