Maria Palmer

Maria Palmer, born Maria Pichler on 5 September 1917 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, was an Austrian-born American actress whose career spanned stage, film, radio, and television. She died on 6 September 1981 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, one day after her 64th birthday, of cancer, and was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Hollywood Hills, California.

Palmer's introduction to performance came early. As a child actor in Vienna, she appeared in productions staged by Max Reinhardt. She trained as a dancer and became a member of the Bodenwieser Ensemble, later expanding her studies to drama and voice at the Vienna Conservatory. In 1938, a year before the outbreak of World War II, she emigrated to the United States with her parents.

Her New York stage career began in 1942, when she appeared in the drama The Moon Is Down, a credit also verified in Broadway records. She continued performing on Broadway through 1955, with additional credits including The Vigil and the drama The Diary of Anne Frank.

Palmer's film work began the same year as her Broadway debut. Her screen debut came in the 1942 short Nostradamus and the Queen, in which she portrayed Catherine de' Medici. Her feature film debut followed in Mission to Moscow in 1943. In 1944 she appeared in Days of Glory alongside Gregory Peck, and later that year in Lady on a Train. During this period she frequently appeared in war films and films noir, filling Hollywood's demand for actresses who could portray exotic foreign characters.

As her film career diminished in the 1950s, Palmer transitioned into radio, television, and commercials, and established her own production company, Maria Palmer Enterprises. In the early 1960s she hosted a Los Angeles television program called Sincerely, Maria Palmer. Her television acting credits from that period include the role of Elsa in the Rawhide episode The Immigrants on CBS in 1962, the role of Marushka Vesterhauzy in the Sam Benedict episode A Bird of Warning on NBC the same year, and appearances in two Perry Mason episodes: as murderer Florence Wood in the 1962 episode The Case of the Borrowed Baby, and as Nora Krasner in the 1963 episode The Case of Lawful Lazarus. In her later years she wrote television screenplays, a number of which went unproduced, sometimes working under the pseudonym Eliot Parker White.

Palmer's papers, covering the years 1922 through 1975, are held by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In her personal life, she married Dr. Franz Marmorek at the age of 16; the marriage later ended in divorce.