Nancy Olson

Born in Milwakee (Wisconsin), on July 14, 1928, Nancy Ann Olson is the daughter of a doctor. She studied at the University of Wisconsin, and later began working on the stage. Her physical attractiveness did not go unnoticed by Paramount executives, who rushed to offer her a contract.

After a very brief part, as a young woman in an art gallery, in Jennie , she appeared in Canadian Pacific , a western with Randolph Scott . After seeing her on the screen, her bosses saw that she had enormous potential for stardom and considered giving her weighty roles, such as the protagonist of Samson and Delilah , by Cecil B. De Mille. Although they ultimately settled on Hedy Lamarr , Her teacher Billy Wilder turned to her, despite her inexperience to play a role in Twilight of the Gods .

She played Betty Schaefer, the script reviewer who ruins a project for the protagonist, screenwriter Joe Gillis ( William Holden ), at the beginning of the film, but later ends up helping him write. She obtained as a secondary one of the eleven Oscar nominations for the film, which finally only took three.

It was a critical and box office success, so Paramount decided to repeat the move of pairing her with Holden, in three other titles: The Force of Arms , Union Station and Submarine Command . They all went unnoticed, like other of her films, such as Wheat and Emerald , in which she shared the bill with Jane Wyman and Sterling Hayden , or the thriller Big Jim McLain , in which she starred with John Wayne . The great Raoul Walsh tried to harness his talents in Beyond Tears and starred in a musical comedy, Mr. Music , withBing Crosby . But it had not just emerged, so the executives of the production company dispensed with it.

In 1950, she married the prestigious lyricist Alan Jay Lerner , author of Brigadoon and An American in Paris , which reinforced her status in Hollywood. But she opted for family life and prioritized caring for the two daughters they had. While the marriage lasted, he created the unforgettable musical My Fair Lady , whose libretto was originally dedicated to her: “To Nancy, my love.”

After their divorce, in 1957, the producer Walt Disney noticed her, who gave her prominent roles in Polyanna and especially in A Wise Man in the Clouds and its sequel, The Wise Man in Trouble , where she was the lead with Fred MacMurray. She played the fiancée of a professor (MacMurray), who invents a revolutionary anti-gravity substance, so he forgets about his own wedding. Many years later she would have a cameo in Flubber and the Nutty Professor , the remake with Robin Williams .

It has been lavished over the years on the Broadway stage, with plays like “Mary, Mary.” She remarried businessman, producer and screenwriter Alan Livingston, with whom she had another son, Christopher Livingston, an occasional film director.

In the last stage of her career, in addition to lavishing herself on television series, she had a passenger role in Aeropuerto 75 , one of the installments of the famous catastrophic saga, in which a passenger plane collided with a small plane.

Although she retired in the mid-1980s, Nancy Olson has occasionally returned to work, for example in an episode of the series Big Love , and in the film Dumbbells .