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Eve Arden
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Trivia
Adopted a son with Brooks West.
Interred at Westwood Memorial Park, Los Angeles, California, USA, Section D, #81.
Adopted her stage name while looking over some cosmetics and spotting the names "Evening in Paris" and "Elizabeth Arden".
Biography from Leonard Maltin's Movie Encyclopedia:
If this tall, attractive blonde didn't exactly invent the character of the leading lady's sardonic, wisecracking-and usually dateless-best friend, she certainly set the standard for all the others. She'd been on stage since her teens, and even had bits in a couple of early musicals, The Song of Love (1929) and Dancing Lady (1933), for which production records list her under her real name. In 1934, she returned to New York and became a Ziegfeld girl, but three years later she was back on the Coast, and almost immediately molded her screen persona as a cynical would-be actress in Stage Door (1937). She worked virtually nonstop thereafter, most notably in Having Wonderful Time, Letter of Introduction (both 1938), At the Circus (1939, as perhaps the only woman to get the best of Groucho), Slightly Honorable, Comrade X (both 1940), Ziegfeld Girl, Whistling in the Dark, Manpower (all 1941), Let's Face It (1943), Cover Girl (1944), Mildred Pierce (1945, with a dazzling performance that earned her an Oscar nomination), Night and Day, The Kid From Brooklyn (both 1946), The Unfaithful, Voice of the Turtle (both 1947), One Touch of Venus (1948), Tea for Two, Paid in Full (both 1950), and We're Not Married (1952).
That same year marked a turning point in Arden's career: She'd been playing Connie Brooks, the utterly sane (but still sharp-tongued) schoolteacher in a wellliked radio sitcom, "Our Miss Brooks," since 1948, but in 1952 the show moved to TV and became an instant smash. It ran four years, earning her an Emmy in 1953, and even spinning off a feature version in 1956. She concentrated on TV thereafter, including two more sitcoms, "The Eve Arden Show" (1957-58) and "The Mothers-In-Law" (1967-69), and such TV movies as All My Darling Daughters (1972). Arden also returned to the stage during this period. But she still made occasional film appearances, notably in Anatomy of a Murder (1959), The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1960), Sergeant Deadhead (1965), Under the Rainbow (1981), and the Grease movies (1978 and 1982). Hers was a unique comic talent, and the screen is much poorer for her absence. Her autobiography, "Three Phases of Eve," was published in 1985.
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