Martha-Bryan Allen

Martha-Bryan Allen (April 30, 1903 – July 29, 1985) was an American stage actress born in Louisville, Kentucky, to Bryan H. and Rebecca D. Allen. Her father held the position of treasurer at a local electric company. Allen's sister Elizabeth was also an actress and became the first wife of film star Robert Montgomery, making her the mother of Elizabeth Montgomery, known for her role in Bewitched.

Before entering the professional theater, Allen trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City. Her Broadway debut came on January 9, 1922, when she took on the role of Angelica in Leonid Andreyev's He Who Gets Slapped. Within two months she returned to the stage as the envoy's daughter in Bernard Shaw's Back to Methuselah, and the following year she appeared in a second Shaw production, The Devil's Disciple, playing the role of Essie.

Allen's Broadway career continued through the mid-1920s with a series of varied roles. She played Lucy Blake in Gypsy Jim, a three-act play written by Oscar Hammerstein and Milton Herbert Gropper, and Appolonia Lee in Sophie Treadwell's O, Nightingale. In The Carolinian, written by Rafael Sabatini and J. Harold Terry, she portrayed Myrtle Carey. In 1925 she was cast in the title role of John B. Hymer and Le Roy Clemens' Aloma of the South Seas, though Vivienne Osborne replaced her shortly before the production's New York debut. Later that same year she appeared as Dora, a circus entertainer, in René Fauchois' The Monkey Talks, which proved to be a hit.

Allen married Lewis Arthur Cushman Jr. in 1926 and retired from the stage following the marriage. Cushman was the founder of the American Bakeries Company, which grew out of Cushman Bakeries, a company originally established by his father. Allen died on July 29, 1985, at her home in Patterson, New York. She was survived by her daughter and was preceded in death by her husband and a son. Her papers from 1924 to 1925 are held by the Billy Rose Theatre Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.