Louisa Horton

Louisa Fleetwood Horton, born September 20, 1920, in Beijing, China, was an American actress whose work spanned stage, film, and television. The daughter of a United States Marine Corps officer, she grew up in Haiti and the Washington, D.C. area before pursuing a professional career in the performing arts. She worked under her given name, Louisa Horton, throughout her career.

Horton's Broadway career ran from 1943 to 1951 and included appearances in The Grand Tour and The Happiest Years. Her most prominent stage credit came in 1946, when she took the lead role in the romantic comedy The Voice of the Turtle. She had previously met actor George Roy Hill while both were performing in a Shakespeare repertory company, and the two married in 1951.

Her film work began with a featured role in the 1948 adaptation of Arthur Miller's All My Sons, appearing alongside Edward G. Robinson and Burt Lancaster. She returned to film nearly three decades later in the 1976 adventure picture Swashbuckler, which starred James Earl Jones and Robert Shaw. Her television work encompassed numerous live television series. In 1989, she drew attention for her off-Broadway performance in The Blessing, in which she played the mother of a lesbian daughter.

In her personal life, Horton and George Roy Hill, who later directed the Academy Award-winning film The Sting in 1973 as well as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969, had four children together before divorcing in the 1970s. The two reportedly maintained a close relationship following their separation. Hill died in 2002. Horton spent nearly five decades living in Manhattan. She died on January 25, 2008, at the Lillian Booth Actors' Fund Home in Englewood, New Jersey, at the age of 87, survived by four children and twelve grandchildren.