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 an actor, that 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, that 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 on 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
Umarli w butach (1941), but her performance was left on the cutting room floor.She was then cast in short subjects and given other assignments typical of novice
film actors, to enable them to learn their craft, such as voice-acting and appearances 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
Misja w Moskwie (1943), directed by Michael Curtiz and starring
Walter Huston as the U.S. ambassador to the USSR. 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 wartime affair, lasting from March 21, 1943, to December 5, 1944.She went back to the B's with
The Mysterious Doctor (1943),
then bounced back to the A-list for
Pomiędzy dwoma światami (1944), a
remake of the Leslie Howard
vehicle Outward Bound (1930) in
which she played Paul Henreid's fiancee (both die from suicide, but in Hollywood logic that didn't mean they couldn't frolic 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
Duma marynarki (1945)
with John Garfield.In the 1946 Warner Bros. remake of W niewoli uczuć (1946), she took the role
that Bette Davis had made good in 1934 (ironically, at rival RKO). Though
Parker would be gaining kudos and Oscar nominations by the beginning of the next decade, her portrait of Mildred was weak in comparison with
Davis's dynamic performance.Parker received the first of her three Best Actress Oscar nominations
for playing a prisoner in Uwięziona (1950), and won the best actress award at the Venice Film Festival. She
was also nominated the next year for playing the cop's wife who shared a secret with the neighborhood abortionist in
William Wyler's
Opowieści o detektywie (1951). Her third
and last Oscar nod came for
Przerwana melodia (1955),
wherein she played 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
Złotoręki (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 she never quite became a major star. Audiences attending a movie starring 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 Opowieści o detektywie (1951) and
Złotoręki (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 over and over, as most actors
do. She probably best remembered for the relatively tame part as the Baroness in
Dźwięki muzyki (1965).She received an Outstanding Lead Actress Emmy nomination in 1963 for
her appearance in
The Eleventh Hour (1962)
episode Why Am I Grown So Cold? Despite the success of
Dźwięki muzyki (1965) being completely attributed to #1 box office sensation
Julie Andrews, it's probably Parker's best-remembered role.Her appearances in such fare as The Oscar (1966) (the cast of which the Playboy Magazine reviewer derided as "has-beens and never-will-bes")
and the movie adaptation of
Norman Mailer's indescribable
existential potboiler
Amerykańskie marzenie (1966) with
fellow Oscar-nominee Stuart Whitman
signaled that Miss Parker was now inscribed on the list of the
has-beens.She had one last hurrah, winning a Golden Globe nomination in 1970 as
best lead actress for her role in the TV series
Bracken's World (1969), but
unfortunately times had changed during the tumultuous 1960s. Her last
film role was in a Farrah Fawcett bomb,
Opalenizna (1979). Subsequently, she
appeared very infrequently on TV, most recently in
Cena za umarłego (1991).Eleanor Parker retired far too soon for those who were her fans, and those who appreciated a superb actress.show more
