Nancy Guild

Movie and television actress Nancy Guild was a contract player at 20th Century-Fox, which reminded the public that her surname "rhymes with wild" after she was signed to a seven-year contract in 1946. The studio bosses must have changed their mind how they would position her as she typically played demure, ladylike roles. She made her debut as a night club chanteuse in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Somewhere in the Night (1946), which was marketed with newspaper ads bearing the "Nancy Guild Rhymes with Wild" slug line. She followed that up with the Philip Marlowe picture The Brasher Doubloon (1947), based on Raymond Chandler's novel "The High Window." On the rebound from an engagement with producer Edward Lasker, Guild married fellow 20th Century-Fox contract player Chuck Russell in early 1947. The following year, they appeared together in the Dan Dailey musical Give My Regards to Broadway (1948). Leaving Fox, she co-starred with Orson Welles in Gregory Ratoff's Black Magic (1949) before moving on to Universal Studios, where she appeared in Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951). In 1953, her last year in pictures, she appeared opposite a talking mule in Francis Covers the Big Town (1953), her last picture. Having divorced Russell in 1950, Guild married the successful Broadway impresario Ernest H. Martin, the three-time Tony Award-winning producer of Guys and Dolls (1955), The Sound of Music (1965), and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966) among others, in 1951. She appeared occasionally on television, retiring after an appearance on Robert Montgomery Presents (1950) in 1955. She did return to the silver screen in 1971, in Otto Preminger's Such Good Friends (1971) She divorced Martin in 1975, marrying and divorcing (for a third time each) photojournalist John Bryson in 1978. Her final marriage lasted 17 years. Nancy Guild died in East Hampton, New York on August 16, 1999, at the age of 73. She had one child, Elizabeth, a daughter by her first husband Charles Russell.