Alice Reinheart

Alice Reinheart (May 6, 1910 – June 10, 1993) was an American actress whose career spanned Broadway, radio, film, and television across several decades. Born in San Francisco, California, she grew up in Winnemucca, Nevada, and demonstrated exceptional musical ability from an early age, giving piano concerts at the age of twelve and earning recognition as a child prodigy. Before she turned sixteen, she had traveled extensively throughout Europe. Her formal education included journalism studies at the University of Wisconsin, drama and language studies at the University of California, and piano training at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

Reinheart began her acting career at fifteen, spending two years performing in stock productions with the Players Guild in San Francisco. Her radio debut followed in 1928 on KYA in San Francisco, launching what would become a prolific career in the medium. By 1936, she was appearing in as many as twelve radio programs in a single week, working across both soap operas and prime-time dramatic programming. Her most prominent radio role was Chichi in Life Can Be Beautiful, which she played from 1938 to 1946. Among her many other radio credits were One Man's Family, The Woman in My House, Nona from Nowhere, Wendy Warren and the News, Young Doctor Malone, Front Page Farrell, Gang Busters, John's Other Wife, Her Honor Nancy James, Casey Press Photographer, Call the Police, The Court of Human Relations, the Molle Mystery Theater episode "Killer Come Back to Me" broadcast on May 17, 1946, and Romance Inc., among others. In the late 1940s, she and her second husband, actor Les Tremayne, co-hosted a morning talk program called The Tremaynes.

Reinheart possessed an exceptional vocal range of three and a half octaves and could scream ten full notes above high C, a talent noted in press coverage for its ability to drive studio control needles to sixty decibels. One of her radio assignments brought an unusual distinction: after she portrayed the Duchess of Windsor in an episode of The March of Time, the Duchess herself invited Reinheart to a reception, expressing pleasure at the portrayal.

Her Broadway career extended from 1931 to 1949. Her stage credits included Papavert in the 1931–1932 season, Foolscap in 1933, The Mask and the Face in 1933, The Drums Begin in 1933, The Wooden Slipper in 1934, Journey to Jerusalem in 1940, and Leaf and Bough in 1949. The 1940 production of Journey to Jerusalem also became part of an early distribution experiment: the production was filmed and made available through Theater-on-Film Inc. for exhibition by more than 25,000 owners and renters of 16-millimeter sound-equipped projectors across the country.

Reinheart's film work began during her travels abroad, when she made short films in English, German, and French. A 1932 item in Film Daily reported that she appeared in several shorts and feature productions for Ufa while in Berlin. Her first American film appearance was in The Sky Hawk, produced at the Brooklyn Vitaphone studio. Her feature film credits included The Lieutenant Wore Skirts, Bachelor Flat, and The Iron Sheriff. On television, she appeared in Dragnet, The Donna Reed Show, The Danny Thomas Show, Get Smart, I Dream of Jeannie, and Mission Impossible.

In her personal life, Reinheart was a dedicated reader whose home was described in a 1940 magazine article as functioning essentially as a library with living quarters. She maintained a large collection of fine editions and kept a four-volume scrapbook, begun in 1928, into which she copied excerpts from world literature in her own handwriting. On September 26, 1938, she married William Burke Miller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former newspaper reporter whom she had met when he was night manager at NBC. Her second marriage, to Les Tremayne, took place on December 11, 1945, and ended in divorce in 1962. In the 1970s, Reinheart relocated to Farmington, Connecticut, where she served as president of the Farmington Historical Society. She died on June 10, 1993, at the Brightview Convalescent Home in Avon, Connecticut, leaving no survivors.