June Martel

June Martel, born Martha Irene Greif on November 19, 1909, in Chicago, Illinois, was a singer, stage actress, and film actress. She died on November 23, 1978, in Los Angeles County, California.

Martel launched her career as a singer in Atlantic City, New Jersey, before transitioning to stage work. In May 1934, she appeared on Broadway in the play The Perfumed Lady, and that same month she was part of the cast of Snatch as Snatch Can, alongside actor Barton MacLane. Her film career began the following year with Front Page Woman (1935) and Going Highbrow (1935), and she took on the female lead role in Fighting Youth (1935), a film that wove together college football and the subject of communist influence on collegiate athletics.

In 1935, Harry Warner of Warner Bros. signed Martel, placing her among a group of aspiring actresses at the studio that included Olivia de Havilland, June Grabiner, Nan Grey, and Dorothy Dare. By August 1936, she had moved to Paramount Pictures, where the studio cast her as the ingenue in American Plan, a production adapted from an unpublished play by Manny Seff and Milton Lazarus centering on a woman who inherits a newspaper. That same year she appeared in Sitting on the Moon (1936). Her later screen work in the decade consisted largely of western films, including Forlorn River (1937), Wild Horse Rodeo (1937), and Santa Fe Stampede (1938).

In her personal life, Martel had been married to Walter J. Klavun, from whom she obtained a divorce in Mexico in 1938. In February 1941, she married screenwriter, scenarist, and magazine writer Frank Fenton. A petite brunette, Martel was also known by 1937 to have assembled a small trunkload of odd pieces of jewelry she had collected over the years.