Frieda Altman

Frieda Altman (August 18, 1904 – January 14, 2002) was an American theatre and television character actress whose Broadway career spanned from 1932 to 1960. Her stage credits included Hilda Cassidy, Days to Come, Spring Song, Picnic, and Paradise Lost, among other productions. On television, she is perhaps best remembered for her recurring role as Mrs. Miller, the housekeeper, on the CBS soap opera Search for Tomorrow, a part she held from 1965 to 1971.

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, on August 18, 1904, Altman was the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants Samuel and Bella Altman. Her early education took her through George Putnam School and Boston Latin School, where she graduated in 1920, before she went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts from Wellesley College in 1924. She completed that degree approximately two months before her twentieth birthday, making her the second youngest member of her graduating class.

Her earliest documented public performances date to her childhood and college years. In the spring of 1916, at age eleven, she was among five hundred young dancers performing at the annual May Festival at Boston's Mechanic's Building. Seven years later, at Wellesley's annual Tree Day, she was one of five participants in a group dance described as an odd dance of candy sticks. By February 1926, she had taken on an organizational role, receiving credit as assistant to directors in a production of Kalidasa's Shakuntala. That April, now serving as Chairman of Dramatics for Junior Hadassah, she appeared as the second-billed player in that group's Yiddish-language staging of Abraham Goldfaden's Shulamith. The following year, at Boston's Brattle Hall, she starred as Vera in Israel Zangwill's The Melting Pot, produced by the Junior Council of Temple Ashkenaz in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In 1929, Altman portrayed the Virgin Mary in A Christmas Mystery, a production that marked the resumption of the Boston Public Library's annual Nativity Play after a two-year hiatus. The following February she directed The Eternal Song by Marc Arnstein, one of two one-act plays comprising the debut of the Temple Israel Little Theatre of Boston. By December 1930, she had joined an amateur troupe called Lend-a-Hand Masque, performing in the Greater Boston region, and appeared in their production of Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp at the Brookline High School auditorium on December 6.

Before making her Broadway debut in 1932, Altman spent approximately eight months, beginning no later than December 1931, with the University Players in Falmouth. Her colleagues there included Margaret Sullavan, Henry Fonda, James Stewart, Kent Smith, Mildred Natwick, Myron McCormick, Bretaigne Windust, and actor-director Joshua Logan. During her first month with the company, she was part of the supporting cast in the comedy It's a Wise Child, starring Sullavan and Fonda and directed by Logan. She later played Mary Magdalene in Don Marquis's passion play The Dark Hours, in a cast that included Logan as Pontius Pilate, Windust as Judas Iscariot, and Barbara O'Neil as Procla. She also appeared as Mrs. Barwick in John Balderston's time-travel fantasy Berkeley Square, alongside Windust, O'Neil, Natwick, and McCormick.

Altman's television work extended beyond Search for Tomorrow. In 1952, she co-starred with child actress Patsy Bruder in Little Girl, an episode of Lights Out, playing Aunt Sarah opposite Bruder's Alice. In 1963, she appeared in the DuPont Show of the Week episode Ride with Terror, alongside Vincent Gardenia, Gene Hackman, Ron Leibman, and Tony Musante; the episode was later remade in 1967 as The Incident. That same year she co-starred with Boris Tumarin in the Eternal Light episode The Book and the Window, with Tumarin as Israel Friedlander and Altman as his wife, Lilian. Her film appearances included an uncredited role as a saboteur in The House on 92nd Street (1945), an uncredited part as a ticket seller in Go Man Go (1954), and a credited role as Jenny Johnson in Fail Safe (1964).

On September 3, 1933, Altman married Benjamin Gamzue, also known as Boris, a Latvian-born professor of English and literature who spent his career on the faculty of New York University. Predeceased by her husband, Altman died in Manhattan on January 14, 2002, at the age of 97.