Fay Baker

Fay Baker, born Fay Schwager on January 31, 1917, in New York, New York, was an American actress and writer who worked across stage, film, and television. She died on December 8, 1987, at the age of 70. Her father was a surgeon and her mother was a pharmacist. Baker attended Smith College before beginning her professional career in acting, with early experience gained through roles on radio soap operas.

Baker's Broadway career spanned from 1938 to 1946. Her first stage credit was Danton's Death in 1938, and her subsequent Broadway appearances included Journey to Jerusalem, the comedy The Sun Field, the comedy Another Love Story, the comedy Violet, and Wonderful Journey, which marked her final Broadway role in 1946.

Following her stage career, Baker relocated to California, where she worked in film for nearly two decades, accumulating credits in approximately two dozen pictures. She received star billing in The House on Telegraph Hill in 1951 and took a leading role in the 1950 crime drama Double Deal. In 1952, she appeared in the drama Deadline - U.S.A., playing one of two daughters attempting to seize control of a newspaper from editor Humphrey Bogart's character, alongside Ethel Barrymore.

During her California years, Baker was also a frequent presence on television, earning guest credits on 30 different series. Her first television appearance was on Your Show Time in 1949, and her final performance came on Dr. Kildare in 1963. Her television work ranged across genres, including comedy sitcoms such as Hazel and The Donna Reed Show, the drama Perry Mason, and the western Have Gun - Will Travel. In 1958 alone, she made two separate appearances on Perry Mason, portraying Marian Newburn in "The Case of the Demure Defendant" and Stephanie Sabin in "The Case of the Perjured Parrot."

A back injury prior to 1963 interrupted Baker's acting career and prompted her to turn to writing. She sold nonfiction pieces to magazines and received $50,000 from a producer for one of her stories. Baker published fiction under the pen name Beth Holmes, a pseudonym she adopted to prevent her family from being compared to characters in her work. Under that name she wrote the novel The Whipping Boy. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1972 and documented that experience in her memoir My Darling, Darling Doctors, published in 1975 under her own name.

On August 3, 1940, Baker married writer and producer Arthur Weiss in Manhattan. The couple had two children; their son Jonathan was born in 1950. They divorced in 1965, after which Baker returned to New York with her children while Weiss remained in California working for producer Irwin Allen. Baker died on December 8, 1987, following a fifteen-year battle with breast cancer.