Nina Foch (April 20, 1924 -
December 5, 2008) was a Dutch
-born
American actress and leading lady in many 1940s and 1950s
films.
Early life
Nina Foch
was born Nina Consuelo Maud Fock in Leiden
,
Holland. Her mother was American actress and singer Consuelo
Flowerton, who returned to the U.S. after her marriage to Foch's
father, Dutch
classical music
conductor Dirk Fock; they divorced when Nina was a toddler. As she
grew up in New York, her mother encouraged her artistic talent. She
played the piano and enjoyed art but was more interested in
acting.
Career
Foch's movie fame came during the height of the 1940s, when she
played cool, aloof, and often foreign women of sophistication. She
would ultimately be featured in over 80 films and hundreds of
television shows.
The actress was a regular in
John
Houseman's
CBS
Playhouse 90 television
series. In 1951, she appeared with
Gene
Kelly in the musical
An American in Paris, which
was awarded the
Best
Picture Oscar. Foch played
Marie
Antoinette in
Scaramouche (1952) and
Bithiah in
Cecil B.
DeMille's The Ten Commandments
(1956), in which she played the Pharaoh's
sister who found the baby Moses in the
bullrushes, adopted him as her son, and joined him and the Hebrews
in their Exodus from Egypt
.
Foch received a nomination for the
Academy Award for Best
Supporting Actress for her role in the boardroom drama
Executive Suite (1954),
starring
William Holden. She appeared
in
Spartacus (1960) opposite
Kirk Douglas and
Laurence Olivier as a woman who chooses
gladiators to fight to the death in the ring, simply for her
entertainment. In1963, she appeared as herself in the
National Broadcasting Company game show
Your First Impression. In 1964,
she appeared in the title role of the episode "Maggie, Queen of the
Jungle" of
Craig Stevens's
CBS drama
Mr. Broadway.
She was cast as Eva Frazier in the
Outer Limits episode
"
The Borderland". On television, she
was cast as the first murder victim of the
Columbo mystery series starring
Peter Falk, appearing in the pilot movie,
Prescription: Murder (1968), with
Gene Barry as her husband, a homicidal
psychiatrist.
In the early 1970s, she guest starred on NBC's
The Brian Keith Show. In 1975, she
appeared in the film
Mahogany
starring
Diana Ross. More recently, she
appeared on the television series
Just
Shoot Me,
Bull
and
NCIS, the latter
portraying
Dr. Donald "Ducky"
Mallard's elderly mother.
Late in her career, she appeared as 'Frannie Halcyon' in the 1994
UK coproduction of Channel Four, Working Title Films and Propaganda
Films that adapted Armistead Maupin's
Tales of the City.
She appeared in "War and Remembrance" as the seemingly-nice
librarian who soon advises
Jane
Seymour's character that the best place for her and her uncle
would be the un-aptly named "Paradise Ghetto". Another notable TV
role was as the Overseer Commander, (or "Kleezantzun/" in the first
of the "Alien Nation--The Series" TV Movies, 'Body and Soul'.
Foch
taught "Directing the Actor" classes at the USC School of
Cinematic Arts
, classes she had taught since the 1960s up to her
death. She also worked as an independent script-breakdown
consultant for many prominent Hollywood directors.
Personal life and death
Foch lived in Beverly Hills, California for 40 years, and had one
son, Dr. Dirk de Brito. Foch married 3 times, the first to
James Lipton, host of
Inside the Actors Studio. She
married Dennis Brito in 1959. The couple had one child before
divorcing in 1963. Her last marriage, to Michael Dewell in 1967
ended in divorce in 1993.
Foch died December 5, 2008, of complications from the blood
disorder
myelodysplasia at
the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, her son, Dr. Dirk De Brito,
told the
Los Angeles Times.
She had become ill
while teaching at the University of Southern
California
's School of Cinematic Arts.
Filmography
References
-
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/11/AR2008121103464.html
- http://www.filmreference.com/film/72/Nina-Foch.html
-
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/3685382/Nina-Foch.html
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