Carol Ohmart

Carol Ohmart, born Armelia Carol Ohmart on June 3, 1927, in Salt Lake City, Utah, was an American actress, model, and Broadway performer whose career spanned from the late 1940s through the mid-1970s. Raised in a Mormon family, Ohmart spent much of her childhood in Seattle, Washington, after her family relocated there shortly following her birth. Her father, C. Thomas Ohmart, was a dentist who had previously worked as a professional actor, and her mother shared the first name Armelia. As a young teenager, Ohmart sang on radio stations including KFRC in San Francisco and KSL, KUTA, and KDYL in Salt Lake City, and performed with dance bands, among them the Jan Garber orchestra.

Ohmart attended East High School in Salt Lake City briefly before graduating from Lewis and Clark High School in Spokane, Washington. Returning to Utah after graduation, she won the Miss Utah title in 1946 and subsequently placed fourth runner-up in the Miss America pageant. Her pageant success led to modeling work beginning in 1947, during which she served as the model for the character Copper Calhoun in Milton Caniff's Steve Canyon comic strip and was featured in a profile in Popular Photography that same year.

Her early professional work included television commercials and appearances on NBC's Bonny Maid Versatile Varieties from 1949 to 1951, a Friday-night program on which she appeared alongside Anne Francis and Eva Marie Saint. She also worked on The 20th Century Fox Hour and Juke Box Jury. Ohmart moved to New York in 1955, where she worked as an understudy on Broadway, and her verified Broadway credit includes an appearance in Kismet in 1953. Throughout the 1950s and into the early 1970s, she maintained a steady presence in television, with guest roles on programs including Perry Mason, Get Smart, Bat Masterson, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, Ripcord, Men into Space, Tombstone Territory, and Barnaby Jones.

Paramount Pictures signed Ohmart in 1955 and promoted her as a major star, with the press dubbing her a "female Brando." Her feature film debut came in Michael Curtiz's The Scarlet Hour in 1956, in which she received top billing as a married woman who persuades her lover to commit a jewel robbery. Despite nearly two million dollars spent on her promotion, Paramount released her from her seven-year contract following the film. Also in 1956, she co-starred with Anthony Quinn in the crime drama The Wild Party. That same year she married actor Wayde Preston, briefly stepping away from acting before returning to film and television work. Producer Jack Warner cast her in a supporting role in Born Reckless in 1958. Her most widely recognized film role came in William Castle's House on Haunted Hill in 1959, in which she played a murderous wife. She appeared in Wild Youth in 1961, the exploitation film Caxambu! in 1967, and the cult horror film Spider Baby, also released in the late 1960s. Her final screen credit was The Spectre of Edgar Allan Poe in 1974, after which she retired from acting.

In 1962, Ohmart returned to New York City to appear in the off-Broadway production Banderol, and she subsequently took a supporting part in the Denis Sanders-directed film One Man's Way in 1964. During the late 1960s and 1970s, she devoted considerable time to studying spiritualism and New Age philosophy, writing poetry compiled in a manuscript titled Song of Salt. Around 1973, while filming an episode of Barnaby Jones in Los Angeles, she was attacked and beaten by three men in Hollywood, and the prescription medication she received following her hospitalization led to a prolonged addiction.

Ohmart married three times. Her first marriage, to actor Ken Grayson in 1949, was annulled in 1951. Her marriage to Wayde Preston lasted from 1956 to 1958. In 1978, she married William Traberth, a veteran and former firefighter, in Wyoming, subsequently taking the name Kariomar S. Traberth and retiring to Sequim, Washington. She died of natural causes in Fort Collins, Colorado, on January 1, 2002, at the age of 74. Her death was not publicly announced until July 2015. Following cremation, her ashes were scattered over Carter Lake in Loveland, Colorado.