Marianne Stewart

Marianne Stewart, born Annemarie Schünzel on January 16, 1922, in Berlin, Germany, was a German-born American actress who worked across stage, film, and television. She was the daughter of Hanne Brinkmann and Reinhold Schünzel. In 1937, Stewart and her father relocated to the United States, and she subsequently enrolled at Beverly Hills High School, from which she graduated in 1940.

Her screen career began that same year with an uncredited appearance in MGM's Escape, released on November 1, 1940. Her first credited film role followed two years later in Valley of Hunted Men. Stewart's stage career took shape in New York beginning in the mid-1940s, with her Broadway debut occurring on October 23, 1944, when she stepped into Elia Kazan's production of Jacobowsky and the Colonel, replacing Annabella opposite Oscar Karlweis and Louis Calhern. The following autumn, Kazan again directed Stewart in You Touched Me, a Tennessee Williams and Donald Windham adaptation of a D.H. Lawrence short story, in which she appeared alongside Edmund Gwenn and Montgomery Clift. That production was among the Broadway credits she carried between 1945 and 1948, a period that also included The Survivor and Swan Song.

In 1946, Stewart was part of the summer stock company at Elitch Theatre, recognized as the oldest summer stock theater. That same year she married Louis Calhern, her former leading man from Jacobowsky and the Colonel; the marriage lasted until 1955. She later married Wilbur George Dirksing, remaining with him until her death. Stewart died of cancer on May 10, 1992, in Los Angeles, California, at the age of 70.