Mala Powers

Mary Ellen Powers, known professionally as Mala Powers, was born on December 20, 1931, in San Francisco, California, and died on June 11, 2007, in Burbank, California. Her father worked as an executive for United Press Associations, and her mother served as a minister. The family relocated to Los Angeles in 1940, the same summer Powers attended the Max Reinhardt Junior Workshop and performed before a live audience for the first time. By age ten she had auditioned for and won a part in the 1942 film Tough as They Come, part of the Little Tough Guys series.

Powers entered radio drama at sixteen before transitioning to film in 1950, when she appeared in both Outrage and Edge of Doom. That same year, Stanley Kramer cast her opposite José Ferrer in Cyrano de Bergerac, in which she played Roxane — a role for which she received a Golden Globe Award nomination. In 1951, at nineteen, she traveled to Korea on a USO entertainment tour and contracted a blood disease. Treatment with chloromycetin triggered a severe allergic reaction that destroyed much of her bone marrow, and her recovery lasted nearly nine months. She resumed her career in 1952, taking the lead in Rose of Cimarron and co-starring roles in City Beneath the Sea and City That Never Sleeps in 1953, while still on medication.

Her subsequent film work included Bengazi and Rage at Dawn in 1955, Tammy and the Bachelor and The Storm Rider in 1957, Man on the Prowl in 1957, Sierra Baron in 1958, and Daddy's Gone A-Hunting in 1969. She also appeared in science-fiction films such as The Unknown Terror, The Colossus of New York, Flight of the Lost Balloon, and Doomsday Machine. Powers accumulated more than one hundred television appearances across her career, with credits including Wagon Train, Bonanza, Maverick, Mission: Impossible, Bewitched, The Wild Wild West, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and Wanted: Dead or Alive. In 1962 she portrayed a woman with leprosy in the CBS series Rawhide, and she made five separate appearances on Perry Mason between the 1950s and 1960s, playing defendants and other characters across distinct episodes. She played the recurring character Mona during the final season of Hazel from 1965 to 1966, and in 1971 she was cast in fifteen episodes of The Man and the City.

In 1964, Powers made her Broadway appearance in Absence of a Cello. Outside of performance, she was a published children's author, with titles including Follow the Star, Follow the Year, and Dial a Story, and she revised and edited two books by Enid Blyton following that author's death. She also narrated a Christmas album titled Follow the Star for RCA Victor.

A significant dimension of Powers's professional life was her work preserving and teaching the acting methodology of Michael Chekhov, under whom she trained for many years in both group and private sessions in Hollywood. After Chekhov's death she was named executrix of his estate, a role she held throughout her life, and she served as patron of the Michael Chekhov Studio in London. She was instrumental in publishing Chekhov's books On the Technique of Acting, To the Actor, and The Path of the Actor, and she produced his audio series On Theatre and the Art of Acting, to which she contributed a sixty-page study guide. Powers co-narrated, alongside Gregory Peck, a documentary on Chekhov titled From Russia to Hollywood. From 1993 to 2006 she taught the Chekhov technique at the University of Southern Maine's summer acting program through the Michael Chekhov Theatre Institute, and she co-founded the National Michael Chekhov Association with colleagues Wil Kilroy and Lisa Dalton.

Powers married Monte Vanton in 1954; the couple had one son, Toren Vanton, and divorced in 1962. In 1970 she married book publisher M. Hughes Miller, who died in 1989. Powers died from complications of leukemia on June 11, 2007, at Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, survived by her son. She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6360 Hollywood Boulevard.