Vivienne Osborne

Vivienne Osborne, a fresh-faced Iowa native who began her acting career at age five, was a familiar presence on both stage and film. After starting out in theater, she made her big screen debut in 1920's "In Walked Mary." Lead roles in other movies followed, but Osborne tended to put stage work first, at one point choosing Broadway over a role in a Douglas Fairbanks Sr. picture (It is also possible that the silent films of that decade could not do justice to Osborne's great singing voice). By the 1930s, her motion picture acting career began to pick up steam again, mostly due to studios offering better roles. Some of her best-known films during this time included "Two Seconds," a '32 drama in which she played Shirley, an unscrupulous dancer who tricks a construction worker into marriage, only to cheat on him behind his back. A year later, she co-starred in the mystery "Tomorrow at Seven" as well as the horror movie "Supernatural," portraying a dead murderess' ghost in the latter. Prior to retiring during the mid-1940s, Osborne appeared in a few more films, most notably '46's "Dragonwyck," an intense drama directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and starring Gene Tierney and Vincent Price.