Lynn Bari (born Marjorie Schuyler Fisher, December 18, 1919 – November 20, 1989) was an American film actress who specialized in playing sultry, statuesque man-killers in roughly 150 films for 20th Century Fox, from the early 1930s through the 1940s.[2]
Early years
Bari was born on December 18, 1919, in Roanoke, Virginia, to John Manard Fisher of Lynchburg, Virginia, and his wife Marjorie Babcock Halpen, a native of Albany, New York. Her father was a successful auto sales manager who for many years worked for a Roanoke car dealership, Harper Motor. In 1925, he left his job and moved the family to his hometown, Lynchburg, where he opened a car dealership of his own. Two years later, heavily in debt and struggling to make a sizeable profit, he took his own life while away on a business trip by jumping out of a hotel window. After selling everything to settle debts his widow was left with little money to support herself and her two children: John, her eldest and Marjorie. To make ends meet, she arranged for her sister, Ellen, who with her husband lived in Melrose, Massachusetts, to take in her and her children. Failing to find work in Melrose she moved to Boston, where she met and soon married Reverend Robert Bitzer, a Religious Science minister, in March 1929.
Bari later recalled other children at school in Boston made life miserable for her brother and her, making constant fun of their obvious Southern accents. Determined to eliminate hers, she became involved with amateur theatrics and took elocution lessons. She was enthusiastic when at the age of 13 she was told her stepfather had been reassigned to Los Angeles, where he later became the head of the Institute of Religious Science.[3]
When she was 14 and attending drama school, Bari adopted the stage name Lynn Barrie, a composite of the names of theater actress Lynn Fontanne and author J. M. Barrie.[4] After reading a story about the Italian city of Bari, she decided to change the spelling.[citation needed]
Sixteen year-old Bari was one of 14 young women "launched on the trail of film stardom" August 6, 1935, when they each received a six-month contract with 20th Century Fox after spending 18 months in the company's training school. The contracts included a studio option for renewal for as long as seven years.[5]
In most of her early films Bari had uncredited parts usually playing receptionists or chorus girls. She struggled to find starring roles in movies. Rare leading roles included China Girl (1942), Hello, Frisco, Hello (1943), and The Spiritualist (1948). In B movies, Bari was usually cast as a "man-killer", as in Orchestra Wives (1942), or a villainess, notably Shock and Nocturne (both 1946). An exception was the dramatic lead in The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1944). During World War II, according to a survey taken of GIs, Bari was the second-most popular pinup girl after the much better-known Betty Grable.[citation needed]
Bari's film career fizzled out in the early 1950s when she was just in her early 30s, but she continued to work at a limited pace over the next two decades, playing matronly characters rather than temptresses. She portrayed the mother of a suicidal teenager in a 1951 drama On the Loose and a number of supporting parts.
She quickly took up the rising medium of television during the 1950s; she starred in the live television sitcom Detective's Wife, which ran during the summer of 1950.[6][7] In 1952, Bari starred in her own sitcom Boss Lady, a summer replacement for NBC's Fireside Theater. She portrayed Gwen F. Allen, the beautiful top executive of a construction firm.[8]
Commenting on her "other woman" roles, Bari once said "I seem to be a woman always with a gun in her purse. I'm terrified of guns. I go from one set to the other shooting people and stealing husbands!"
In the 1960s, Bari toured in a production of Barefoot in the Park, playing the bride's mother.[10]
In Foxy Lady (2010), an authorized biography by film historian Jeff Gordon written from interviews conducted shortly before her death, Bari suggested that, despite a 35-year career with over 166 film and television roles, a more promising career was sabotaged by unresolved problems with her domineering, alcoholic mother and her three marriages.[12]
Bari was married to agent Walter Kane, producer Sidney Luft, and psychiatrist Dr. Nathan Rickles. Bari and Luft married November 28, 1943.[13] They divorced December 26, 1950.[14] She and Rickles wed August 30, 1955;[15] they divorced in 1972. Bari's first child, a daughter with Luft, was born August 7, 1945, in St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica, California, but died the next day.[16] Two years later, she had a son, John Michael Luft (b. 1948). John Michael was the subject of "a bitter custody battle" between Luft and Bari.[17] A judge in Los Angeles ruled in Bari's favor in November 1958, ruling that the Luft household "was an improper place in which to rear the boy."[17]
After retiring from acting in the 1970s, Bari moved to Santa Barbara, California. In her last years, she suffered increasing problems with arthritis.
Death
On November 20, 1989, Bari was found dead in her home in Santa Monica, California, of an apparent heart attack.[18] She was cremated and her ashes scattered at sea.[19]
Hollywood Walk of Fame
Bari has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one for movies at 6116 Hollywood Boulevard, and one for television at 6323 Hollywood Boulevard.[20]
