Marie Windsor; Actress Starred in Several Film Noir Classics

Marie Windsor, who made a career playing strong, independent women in such film noir classics as “Force of Evil,” “The Killing” and “The Narrow Margin,” died of natural causes Sunday at her Beverly Hills home. She was a day short of her 81st birthday.

Windsor appeared in 76 feature films opposite such leading men as Marlon Brando, David Niven, George Raft and James Garner. She made guest appearances on more than 100 television shows (including “Fantasy Island,” “Gunsmoke” and “Murder, She Wrote”) and performed in dozens of stage productions. The Los Angeles Drama Critics voted her best actress for “The Bar Off Melrose” in 1987.

“Marie Windsor . . . has played a wide range of women over the years, but is the definitive film noir heroine--glamorous, smart, tough and dangerous,” wrote Los Angeles Times movie writer Kevin Thomas during a 1999 film noir festival, mounted by American Cinemateque, as a tribute to the actress.

She was the “best of the female heavies,” said Ian Cameron of Movie Magazine.

Born Emily Marie Bertelsen, Windsor was raised in Marysvale, Utah and set her sights on show business early on. She started acting lessons at 11. After winning two local beauty pageants and majoring in drama at Brigham Young University, she headed for Hollywood in 1940 to study with Maria Ouspenskaya.

Windsor took a job as a cigarette girl at Mocambo, a Sunset Strip nightclub, where, one night, she was weeping about her inability to pay the rent. A club patron--movie producer Arthur Hornblow Jr.--noticed her distress and recommended her for a part in the musical “All-American Co-Ed.” for which she auditioned later that week. Windsor went on to win a role.

After appearing in some bit parts, Windsor headed for New York, where she acted in more than 300 radio dramas. She played a femme fatale in Broadway’s “Follow the Girls” which was followed by a contract at MGM. The studio cast her in movies ranging from “Hellfire” (1949), one of her favorites, to Abraham Polonsky’s film noir classic “Force of Evil,” opposite John Garfield.

Fast-paced and gritty, the film noir B-movies captured post-World War II disillusionment. The best, mainly crime thrillers, have withstood the test of time.

“One of the reasons film noir is so popular today is that it left so much to the imagination, in contrast to today when everything is so explicit,” Windsor told the New York Times last year. “Film noir engaged the audience, let them use the gray matter between their ears.” Of her characters, she had mixed feelings: “I liked the parts, but had I met them in real life, I wouldn’t have liked them,” she told one interviewer.

Windsor’s best remembered role was that of a gangster’s widow in Richard Fleischer’s low-budget sleeper “The Narrow Margin” (1952). That caught the attention of a young Stanley Kubrick, who cast her as an unfaithful wife in “The Killing” (1956). The film, considered one of her best, won her the best supporting actress award from Look Magazine.

Critics noted that Windsor often rose above her material. Appearing in second-string films such as “Outlaw Women” (1952), the sci-fi “Cat Women of the Moon” (1953) and “Swamp Women” (1956), she was dubbed “Queen of the B’s”. And, at 5 foot 9, the actress often towered over her male co-stars--never regarding herself as beautiful.

“I wish I’d been more secure and had accepted myself as I was,” she told Jim Meyer in Classic Images, an Iowa-based newspaper of classic film, last year. “I feel the same way about my name. In the earlier days, studios and agents insisted you change your name even if it wasn’t too long for a marquee. . . . I’ve survived more on guts than I ever did on self-confidence.”

In April 1946, she married bandleader Ted Steele, from whom she later obtained an annulment. Eight years later, she wed Beverly Hills Realtor Jack Rodney Hupp, with whom she had a son in 1963.

Though stricken with arthritis in her later years, Windsor remained politically active in the Screen Actors Guild and the Motion Picture and Television Fund.

“She was a conservative in a mostly liberal industry, friends with Chuck Heston and Ronald Reagan,” said her son Richard, 37. “Though her viewpoints weren’t necessarily embraced, they were cause for lively debate.”

In 1990, SAG gave Windsor the Ralph Morgan Award for 25 years of distinguished service on its board of directors. She was named honorary chairwoman of the SAG Film Society, which she had co-founded several years earlier. She was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1983.

Windsor is survived by her husband, son, brother Jerry Bertelsen and sister Louise Atherley. A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. Jan. 6 at the Louis B. Mayer Theater on the Woodland Hills campus of the Motion Picture & Television Fund.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be sent to that organization. For more details, visit https://mariewindsor.com.