Caroline Burke

Caroline Flora Burke (née Berg; July 7, 1913 – December 5, 1964) was an American actress, theater producer, television producer, writer, and art collector. Born in Portland, Oregon, to a Jewish family, she was the daughter of Charles F. Berg, a prominent Portland news radio executive, president of the Pacific Coast Advertising Men's Association, and founder of the Charles F. Berg Company, a women's clothing chain. Her mother was Saidee (née Rosenberg). Burke had one elder brother, Forrest Talbott Berg, from her father's previous marriage. Her father, a San Francisco native, also co-produced "The Hoot Owls," a radio sketch show for KGW. The Charles F. Berg Building, an Art Deco structure in downtown Portland that served as one of the Berg storefronts, is named for him; he died there of a heart attack in 1932.

Burke graduated from the Catlin Hillside School, now known as Catlin Gabel School, and subsequently attended Bryn Mawr College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in art history in 1933. She began her performing career on Broadway, appearing in productions of Brooklyn, U.S.A. in 1941 and Gilbert Miller's Heart of a City in 1942. Her Broadway credits also include the musical The Half Moon, with her Broadway activity documented as early as 1920. In the spring of 1942, she relocated to Los Angeles to pursue film work, while simultaneously working as an advertising and radio editor in California. She appeared in a total of four films, with her first and only leading role as Martha Kincaid in The Mysterious Rider (1942), opposite Buster Crabbe, followed by three minor film appearances before she retired from acting.

From 1946 to 1956, Burke was among the first women producers in television, producing, writing, and directing network series for NBC. Her television work included the award-winning telecast of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author. In the 1950s, she also served on NBC's radio program Monitor, where she interviewed public figures including actor Marlon Brando. She taught television production at Columbia University and founded the art history department at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.

In her later years, Burke worked as a theatrical producer in New York City. She co-produced Broadway stagings of Paddy Chayefsky's The Tenth Man and Brendan Behan's The Hostage. In 1962, she produced the first stage productions of Harold Pinter's The Dumb Waiter and The Collection at the Cherry Lane Theatre. She also served as a contributing editor for Diplomat magazine. At the time of her death in December 1964, she was producing an Off-Broadway staging of Pinter's The Room, which opened the week following her death.

Burke married camera manufacturing magnate Cyrus Max Adler on August 7, 1945, in a private Jewish ceremony at the Portland home of her brother, Forrest. She later married advertising executive Erwin D. Swann, who worked for the Foote, Cone & Belding Ad Agency; the couple lived in Manhattan at 24 West 55th Street. Together, Burke and Swann assembled a significant art collection that included paintings by Pablo Picasso, Paul Gauguin, Paul Klee, Joan Miró, Édouard Vuillard, and Georges Rouault, as well as sculpture by Auguste Rodin, Edgar Degas, Georges Braque, and William Zorach. The collection was displayed at Huntington Hartford's Gallery of Modern Art in New York and at the Portland Art Museum in 1964. The Caroline and Erwin Swann Collection of Caricature and Cartoon, comprising 2,085 drawings, prints, and paintings, is held by the U.S. Library of Congress.

Burke died of undisclosed causes at Memorial Hospital in Manhattan on December 5, 1964. She was survived by her husband Erwin Swann, her mother Saidee Berg, and her brother Forrest Berg.