Heroine of the Month: Virginia Carroll
The DVD of Humphrey Bogart’s All Through the Night (1942) contains a featurette about character actors and actresses in Hollywood. One of the actors interviewed tells a story about advice Robert Altman gave him on the set of Short Cuts (1993), the advice was don’t be a leading man, you’ll make five or six films and then be forgotten, become a character actor and you can raise a family in Hollywood.
That was certainly true for actress Virginia Carroll, a former model who had a long career in film and television while raising a daughter with fellow character actor and serial king Ralph Byrd. She debuted in film as a fashion model in Roberta (1935). Though she had a major role in The Tenderfoot Goes West (1936), the film where she met Ralph Byrd, most of her film work was playing supporting roles in B Westerns like Oklahoma Terror (1938) and The Phantom Rider (1941) as well as bit parts in bigger films like Waterloo Bridge (1940).
She was also a serial semi-regular at her husband’s studio, Republic, where she appeared as a nurse in Mysterious Doctor Satan (1940), G-Men vs. The Black Dragon (1943), and The Crimson Ghost (1946). Other appearances included playing a stewardess in Dick Tracy Returns (1938) and a knife thrower’s assistant in Daughter of Don Q (1947). Her biggest serial roles were a scientist (in old age makeup) who gets impersonated by the villainess in The Black Widow (1947) and Superman’s adoptive Earth mother Martha Kent in Columbia’s Superman (1948).
Ironically, some of her later TV appearances included Adventures of Superman; as well as Dragnet, Perry Mason and Leave It to Beaver. Her last acting role was on an episode of the TV version of The Long, Hot Summer in 1965.
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