Phyllis Povah (1893 - 1975)

Phyllis Povah (July 21, 1893 – August 7, 1975) was an American stage and film actress. Povah made her Broadway theatre debut in Mr. Pim Passes By in 1921 and acted in minor roles in several productions over the next two decades. She achieved a notable success in a featured role in the stage production of […]

Nyree Porter (1936 - 2001)

Nyree Porter was born in Napier, New Zealand in 1936. Her first professional work was touring with the New Zealand Players Trust. She was acclaimed for such roles as Jessica in The Merchant of Venice and Juliet in Romanoff and Juliet. She also performed in revues and musicals. She moved to Britain in 1958 after […]

Daphne Pollard (1892 - 1978)

Daphne Pollard (19 October 1892 in Fitzroy, Melbourne – 22 February 1978 in Los Angeles) was an Australian actress in American films, mostly short comedies. She was also a vaudeville performer and dancer. Born Daphne Trott, she joined the Pollard Lilliputian Opera Company at the age of six, having been taken to rehearsals by her older […]

Suzanne Pleshette (1937 - 2008)

Reviewers described her appearance and demeanor as sardonic and her voice as sultry. Suzanne Pleshette began her career as a stage actress. She made her Broadway debut in Meyer Levin’s 1957 play Compulsion, adapted from his novel inspired by the Leopold and Loeb case. The following year she performed in the debut of The Cold Wind […]

Alice Playten (1947 - 2011)

Alice Playten (August 28, 1947 – June 25, 2011) was an American actress and singer. Born Alice Plotkin in New York City, Playten began her career in the Broadway musical Gypsy (1959). Her other Broadway credits included Oliver!, Henry, Sweet Henry, Hello, Dolly!, Rumors, Seussical, and Caroline, or Change. Her many off-Broadway credits include Promenade, The Last […]

Louise Platt (1915 - 2003)

Louise Platt (August 3, 1915 – September 6, 2003) was an American theater, film, and TV actress. Platt is best remembered for her role as the officer’s pregnant wife in John Ford’s critically acclaimed Stagecoach (1939). After two years on Broadway, she came to Hollywood in 1938. She returned to the New York stage in 1942 […]

Nova Pilbeam (1919 - 2015)

Nova Pilbeam was born in Wimbledon, London. Her parents were Arnold Pilbeam, an actor and theatre manager, and Margery Stopher Pilbeam. Time magazine reported that the actress, whose first name was an homage to her maternal grandmother from Nova Scotia, opted to keep her birth name, which she considered far less ridiculous than “Myrna Loy” or […]

Lottie Pickford (1893 - 1936)

In 1907, Lottie Pickford adopted the stage name ‘Mary Pickford’. The rest of the family adopted the Pickford name by the time they began appearing in films. Mary signed with D.W. Griffith’s Biograph Company in 1909 and also secured work for her siblings. Between 1909 and 1910, Mary made eighty shorts, Jack made twenty-eight, and Lottie […]

Patricia Phoenix (1923 - 1986)

Patricia Phoenix’s big break came in 1948, when she played Sandy Powell’s wife in the Mancunian Film Studios film Cup-tie Honeymoon, followed by a summer season in Blackpool with Thora Hird in the show Happy Days. Exposure led to more serious work with Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East. She also […]

Dorothy Phillips (1889 - 1980)

Dorothy Phillips (October 30, 1889 – March 1, 1980) was an American stage and film actress. Born Dorothy Gwendolyn Strible in Baltimore, Phillips began her career as a stage actress. She made her film debut in 1911, and appeared in over 150 films during her career. For a while she was nicknamed “Kid Nazimova” for her […]

Jean Peters (1926 - 2000)

Due to her insistence, Jean Peters was given the title role in Anne of the Indies (1951), which the press declared was the film that finally brought her stardom. Before its release, she was cast in Viva Zapata! (1952) opposite Marlon Brando. Julie Harris had been considered for this role. Also in 1951, Peters had […]

Barbara Pepper (1915 - 1969)

Barbara Pepper (May 31, 1915 – July 18, 1969) was an American stage, television, radio, and film actress. She is best known as the first “Doris Ziffel” on the sitcom Green Acres. Born as Marion Pepper in New York City, at age 16 she started life in show business as one of the slender, curvy, and […]

Virginia Pearson (1886 - 1958)

Virginia Pearson (March 7, 1886 – June 6, 1958) was an American stage and film actress. She made fifty-one films in a career which extended from 1910 until 1932. Born in Anchorage, Kentucky, Pearson worked for a brief time as an assistant in the public library in Louisville, Kentucky after completing school. Pearson trained in the […]

Alice Pearce (1917 - 1966)

Alice Pearce was born in New York City, the only child of Margaret Clark and Robert E. Pearce. Her father was a foreign banking specialist, and her family moved to Europe when she was 18 months old. They lived in Brussels, Antwerp, Rome, and Paris. At age nine, she fell off of a swing after […]

Eugenia Paul (1935 - 2010)

Eugenia Paul (March 3, 1935 – May 24, 2010) was an American actress and dancer best known for her role as Elena Torres in the television series, Zorro, which aired on the American television network, ABC. Paul was born Eugenia Popoff in Dearborn, Michigan of Russian heritage. She signed as a dancer with Warner Bros. when […]

Luana Patten (1938 - 1996)

Luana Patten was born in Long Beach, California to Harvey T. Patten and Alma (née Miller) Patten, natives of Enid, Oklahoma. At the age of 3 she was a young model and later was hired by Walt Disney. Patten made her first film appearance in Joel Chandler Harris’s 1946 musical Song of the South with […]

Lee Patrick (1901 - 1982)

Lee Patrick’s debut on the Broadway theatre stage began in November 1922 as part of the supporting ensemble cast for Adele and Fred Astaire in the Jerome Kern and Anne Caldwell musical The Bunch and Judy that ran for eight weeks. It was not until September 1924 that Patrick was once again on the Broadway […]

Dorothy Patrick (1921 - 1987)

During her early career Dorothy Patrick was billed under her birth name, Dorothea Davis, until she married a New York Rangers hockey star, Lynn Patrick, and became Dorothy Patrick. Though she had one son in the marriage, the aspiring actress remained career-bound, not ready to co-star as a housefrau. While appearing at dinner-club showcases in Jersey […]

Christine Pascal (1953 - 1996)

Christine Pascal was born in Lyon, Rhône, Pascal made her film debut at 21 in Michel Mitrani’s Les Guichets du Louvre (1974), and began an association with Bertrand Tavernier with her next film, L’Horloger de Saint-Paul (1974). Other films with Tavernier include Que la fête commence (1975), for which she received a César nomination for […]

Natasha Parry (1930 - 2015)

Born in London, Natasha Parry was the daughter of the Anglo-Greek film director Gordon Parry and his Russian wife. (Some sources say Gordon Parry was her stepfather.) Parry made her stage debut at age 12 in The Wingless Victory. At 14, she was in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and later she played in Big Ben and […]

Julie Parrish (1940 - 2003)

Julie Parrish was born Ruby Joyce Wilbar, the eldest of six children, to William Robert Wilbar and Gladys Marie Webb. She spent her early years in Lake City, Tennessee, before moving to Tecumseh, Michigan at age 11. There she graduated from high school. Parrish then attended a modeling school in Toledo, Ohio. She won a […]

Helen Parrish (1924 - 1959)

Helen Parrish started in movies at the age of five, getting her first part playing Babe Ruth’s daughter in the silent film Babe Comes Home in 1927. She was featured in the Our Gang comedy shorts and sometimes played the lead character as a child, co-starring with some of the great female stars of the […]

Suzy Parker (1932 - 2003)

Suzy Parker and two of her sisters were tall, all measuring between 5’10” and 6’1″. Sister Dorian (who modelled under the name Dorian Leigh) was the sole exception, standing 5’5″. In 1944, Dorian worked as an advertising copy writer when a coworker encouraged her to go to the Conover Modeling Agency. Dorian was one of […]

Cecilia Parker (1914 - 1993)

Cecilia Parker was born in Fort William, Ontario. She was brought to southern California as a child by her mother, Mrs. Naudy Anna Parker. Her father was an English soldier. Parker graduated from the Convent of the Immaculate Heart in Hollywood in June 1931. At the time she resided with her parents, Mr. and Mrs. […]

Mila Parély (1917 - 2012)

Mila Parély (7 October 1917 – 14 January 2012) was a French actress of Polish ancestry best known for the roles of Belle’s sister in Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête and as Geneviève in La Règle du jeu.  Born Olga Colette Peszynsky she took to show business early and in 1930 toured America […]

Andrea Palma (1903 - 1987)

Andrea Palma entered the hat business in the early 1920s and opened her own shop, called Casa Andrea (from where she took her first name as an actress, adding the last name of one of her clients, the elegant Mrs. Palma.) Known in the theater world, she had her first opportunity replacing her friend, the […]

Daphne Oxenford (1919 - 2012)

Daphne Oxenford’s best-known role was the voice for BBC radio’s Listen with Mother from 1950 to 1971; she was also a reader on the newspaper review programme What the Papers Say for over thirty years. One of the original cast members of Coronation Street, she played Esther Hayes from 1960 to 1963, 1971 and 1972. […]

Patricia Owens (1925 - 2000)

Patricia Owens (January 17, 1925 – August 31, 2000) was a Canadian-born American actress, working in Hollywood. She appeared in about 40 films and 10 TV episodes in a career lasting from 1943 to 1968. Owens moved to England in 1933 with her parents (her father Arthur Owens who was later to become an MI5 double […]

Seena Owen (1894 - 1966)

Seena Owen’s first important film was A Yankee From the West (1915) under the name Signe Auen at the age of 21. She was later convinced to change her name and settled on Seena Owen, the phonetic spelling of her real name. In 1916 she performed in D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance. The same year she […]

Catherine Owen (1900 - 1965)

First discovered by Laura MacGillivray, the wife of Actors Equity president Frank Gillmore, Catherine Owen appeared on Broadway in the 1920s through early 1930s in productions including The Mountain Man, The Whole Town’s Talking, Trelawny of the Wells, The Love City and The Play’s the Thing. In 1925, Owen was acclaimed as one of the […]