Audrey Totter, who starred in many 1940 noir films and was a former radio actress, passed away Thursday at the age of 95 after suffering a stroke and congestive heart failure.
The news was announced by her daughter Mea Lane, reports the Los Angeles Times.
Totter had a fairly short career as she worked in the 1940s and then she focused on raising a family before a brief return to acting on television. She started out in the adaptation of James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice.
Then in 1947 she starred in Lady in the Lake, which was her first big role. In the film she plays a publishing executive who hires Philip Marlow to find her boss' wife, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
She then went on to play the niece of a radio mystery host in The Unsuspected and was alongside Robert Taylor in High Wall. She was also in the film The Set-Up about an aging boxer.
In a 1999 interview with The New York Times, Totter spoke on her career and said, "The bad girls were so much fun to play."
Her move to raise a family wasn't enough to keep her away from acting forever and she returned for small gigs on TV, including appearing in Perry Mason, Hawaii Five-O, Murder, She Wrote and others.
In 2000, Totter began receiving job offers again as her movies became popular. She spoke with the Toronto Star, indignantly noting, "What could I play? A nice grandmother? Boring! Critics always said I acted best with a gun in my hand."
image: Wikimedia Commons
