Greta Granstedt

Greta Granstedt, born Irene Louise Granstedt on July 13, 1907, in Malmö, Sweden, was an American film, stage, and television actress whose career spanned from the silent film era through the 1960s. Her birth year is listed as 1908 in some sources. She died on October 7, 1987. Her family was among five pioneer Swedish families who settled in north central Kansas between 1867 and 1868, having left Sweden in response to famine.

Granstedt first attracted widespread public attention in April 1922, when, at age 14, she shot her 17-year-old boyfriend Harold Galloway with a pistol she had borrowed from a friend. She maintained that the shooting was accidental, a version of events Galloway himself corroborated. According to her account, she had been carrying the weapon out of fear while walking alone at night, and the gun discharged when Galloway grabbed it after she drew it to frighten him. Newspapers initially reported this account but later shifted to a more sensational version, portraying Granstedt as having waited in ambush out of jealousy over Galloway attending a parish dance with another girl. Galloway's father and aunt supported this alternative narrative, suggesting she had sought Galloway out to prevent him from joining the navy and leaving her. Galloway survived despite an initial onset of peritonitis, and neither he nor his parents pressed charges. On June 30, 1922, Granstedt was sentenced in juvenile court to time in a reform school and was banished from Mountain View.

She subsequently relocated to San Francisco, where she modeled at the San Francisco Art Association in the summer of 1926. In 1927 she traveled from San Francisco to Los Angeles. One account holds that she made the journey by steamer alongside Bessie Hyde, during which trip she adopted the professional name Greta and began presenting herself as Swedish-born rather than Kansas-born. A separate account maintains she hitchhiked south in the company of Geraldine Andrews. In September 1929, Granstedt and her parents departed San Francisco aboard the passenger steamer San Juan. On September 2, the vessel collided with the oil tanker S.C.T. Dodd off Pigeon Point, California. Her father survived, but her mother was among the 77 people who drowned. The crew was subsequently found negligent.

Before establishing herself in film, Granstedt appeared opposite Joseph Schildkraut in a Los Angeles stage production of From Hell Came a Lady. Her early screen work included a small role in the silent film Buck Privates (1928), which featured Hungarian actress Lya de Putti, and she made her sound debut in The Last Performance (1929). She appeared as Beulah Bondi's daughter in the crime drama Street Scene (1931) and as Margo's friend in Crime Without Passion (1934). Among her more prominent later roles was that of Anna Wahl in Hitler, Beast of Berlin (1939), in which she played opposite Alan Ladd as the sole female member of an underground resistance cell. She played a flirtatious wife in Telephone Operator (1937) and appeared as Thulda, a Swedish maid traveling to New York to visit her uncle, in the comedy There Goes My Heart. In 1945 she appeared as Mrs. Lars Faraassen in Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, in the Christmas party and barn-burning scenes. In 1958 she played a California housewife who welcomes Francis Lederer's Count Dracula into her suburban home in The Return of Dracula. During the 1960s her work shifted primarily to television, with appearances on Perry Mason, Peter Gunn, The Millionaire, Lassie, and Dragnet.

Granstedt's Broadway career ran from 1934 to 1937 and encompassed three productions. She appeared in Tomorrow's Harvest, a short-lived play that opened on December 4, 1934, at the 49th Street Theatre and ran for four performances. She next appeared in If a Body, which opened on April 30, 1935, at the Biltmore Theatre and ran for 45 performances. In the 1936–37 season she appeared in the drama Thirsty Soil at the 48th Street Theatre, which opened on February 3, 1937, and ran for 13 performances.

In her personal life, Granstedt was married eight times, four of which ended in annulment. Her first marriage, to Robert Blieber in 1923, was annulled on the grounds that she was a minor. Her second marriage, to California artist Robert Lowenthal in 1926, was also annulled. Her third marriage, to Latin bandleader and tango dancer Ramon Ramos in 1933, was officiated by New York Mayor John P. O'Brien and lasted eighteen months. In 1935 she married French World War I veteran, designer, and photographer Marcel Olis in Greenwich, Connecticut, a marriage that also ended in divorce. Her fifth husband was Max de Vega, a matte painter; she sought annulment rather than divorce upon discovering he was still married to another woman. It was during her marriage to de Vega that she had a Hollywood home designed by California architect Harwell Harris, a house she continued to occupy through the 1950s. In 1944 she married Major Lawrence Wright, a union that was likewise annulled when Wright was found to still be married. In 1947 she married Arthur G. Forbes, a marriage that lasted until 1951 and during which the couple adopted a child.