Nancy Gertrude Guild (October 11, 1925 – August 16, 1999) was an American film actress of the 1940s and 1950s. She appeared in Somewhere in the Night (1946), The Brasher Doubloon (1947), and the comedy Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951). Although appearing in major films, Guild never achieved as much fame at 20th Century Fox, the studio that had signed her to a seven-year contract, as she had hoped, and eventually stopped acting.
Early life
Guild was born at Hollywood Hospital on October 11, 1925, the third child and only daughter of Herbert Hamilton Guild and the former Zilpah Hebert.[2]
Career
Guild was a freshman at the University of Arizona when a photographer from Life magazine noticed her.[3] After her picture was published in a spread on campus fashions, Guild received screen tests at five Hollywood studios, and she was signed by 20th Century Fox. The studio's publicity writers declared "Guild rhymes with wild!" when hyping her in Somewhere in the Night (1946), her first film, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz.[4]
Guild was a panelist on the DuMont network's Where Was I?, a game show, in 1952-1953.[5] She appeared occasionally on television and briefly returned to the movies in Otto Preminger's Such Good Friends (1971).
Personal life
Guild's first husband was actor Charles Russell, whom she married on April 26, 1947. They divorced in November 1949, eight months after their daughter Elizabeth was born.[6] On August 14, 1951, she married producer Ernest H. Martin.[6] They had two daughters, Cecilia (born 1954) and Polly (1957–2004),[7] and divorced in 1975.[8] On April 5, 1983, Guild married photojournalist John Bryson;[9] they divorced in 1995.[4]
Death
On August 16, 1999, she died of emphysema in East Hampton, New York at the age of 73.[10]
^Terrace, Vincent (2011). Encyclopedia of Television Shows, 1925 through 2010 (2nd ed.). Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. p. 1170. ISBN978-0-7864-6477-7.
