Andrea King

Actress at her best displaying icy venom

Georgette André Barry (Andrea King), actress: born Paris 1 February 1919; married 1940 Nathaniel Willis (died 1970; one daughter); died Woodland Hills, California 22 April 2003.

Andrea King was an important member of the contract roster at Warner Brothers during the Forties. Her resemblance to one of the studio's top stars, Ida Lupino (whose sister she played in The Man I Love), possibly hindered her progress, though she had leading roles in such films as Hotel Berlin and The Beast with Five Fingers. She displayed a droll sense of humour with her portrayal of the stage star Lillian Russell in My Wild Irish Rose, but she was at her best displaying icy venom, such as her indelible portrayal of a calculating femme fatale in the film noir Ride the Pink Horse.

Born Georgette André Barry in Paris in 1919, she was the daughter of the Ohio-born Belle Hart, a former dancer with Isadora Duncan who left Duncan's troupe in 1917 to drive ambulances in France. King's father was allegedly a French pilot shot down during the last days of the First World War, but King later came to believe that her mother fabricated this tale because she was in fact the illegitimate daughter of a married businessman.

Returning to New York, Hart married a Wall Street lawyer, Douglas McKee. While attending Edgewood High School in Connecticut, Georgette played Juliet in a school Shakespeare production, and was spotted by a casting agent for the Shuberts, who offered her a small role (billed as Georgette McKee) in a Broadway play about teenage romance, Growing Pains (1933). (Though a flop, the play was to be the inspiration for MGM's later Andy Hardy series of films.) She was then cast as the tomboy sister of Montgomery Clift – making his Broadway début at the age of 14 – in the hit comedy Fly Away Home (1935), praised by the critic of Catholic World for "the unusually delightful cast of juveniles".

After further stage work, she made her screen début in The Ramparts We Watch (1940), then returned to the theatre to tour with Lillian Gish in Life with Father. After marrying Nathaniel Willis, an attorney, in 1940, she toured as the cockney maid in Angel Street, then joined Willis, who had enlisted in the Coast Guard, in San Francisco. "My husband was sent on active duty overseas," she later recalled, "and my New York agent suggested I try pictures, so I went to Los Angeles."

Signed by Warner Brothers, she played an unbilled role as a nurse in Mr Skeffington (1944), but had her first substantial part – with her new name of Andrea King – in The Very Thought of You (1944) as a wife whose sailor husband is away at war. An expert at accents, she tested for the role of the cockney slattern in The Corn is Green, but Bette Davis, the star, considered her "too attractive" and the role went to Joan Lorring.

King played the wife of the flyer Dennis Morgan in God is my Co-Pilot (1945), then was given a starring role in Peter Godfrey's Hotel Berlin (1945). Based on a novel by the author of Grand Hotel, Vicki Baum, and set in a hotel that houses scared Germans during the last days of the Second World War, it was an entertaining melodrama that was hurriedly edited by the studio in order to get it into cinemas before the city actually did fall. King played an actress who resorts to treachery in her efforts to escape Berlin before the Allies arrive.

In 1947 King was featured in four films, and they are the ones for which she is best remembered. In Raoul Walsh's splendid melodrama The Man I Love, she was the troubled sister of a night-club singer (Ida Lupino). In the turn-of-the-century biography of the Irish composer Chauncy Olcott (Dennis Morgan), My Wild Irish Rose, she displayed elegance and poise and photographed beautifully in colour as the legendary musical star Lillian Russell. Dennis Morgan's description of her figure – "more curves than a roller-coaster and just as exciting" – was highly publicised. She was the romantic lead opposite Robert Alda in Robert Florey's chilling horror movie The Beast with Five Fingers, though the film was dominated by the splendid Peter Lorre as a murderer who believes he is threatened by a disembodied hand.

It was the off-beat film noir Ride the Pink Horse, directed by its star Robert Montgomery, that gave King her finest opportunity. She was superb as a coldly duplicitous femme fatale, a characterisation comparable with the best of film noir's predatory heroines.

Having left Warners after going on suspension rather than take a supporting role in Stallion Road (1947), she was effective as a repressed spinster about to embark on an adulterous affair with a married man (Leon Ames) in MGM's taut little thriller Dial 1119 (1950), and she was a cool and cold-blooded head of a gang of thieves in I Was a Shoplifter (1950). Later films included a rare comic role as a gangster's Runyonesque moll in The Lemon Drop Kid (1951) and Band of Angels (1957), in which she was a wicked governess who cheats her charge (Yvonne DeCarlo) out of her inheritance. In William Wellman's Darby's Rangers (1958) she was touching as a Scottish girl married to an older man whom she leaves after starting an affair with a young soldier, who is then killed in a training accident.

Most of King's later work was on television. She starred opposite Edward G. Robinson in a memorable live Lux Theater production of Witness for the Prosecution (1953) and she was in such series as Perry Mason, Cheyenne, Dragnet and 77 Sunset Strip. In 1968 she starred with Peter Falk in the TV movie Prescription – Murder, the pilot film for the series Columbo. She was active in television commercials, and in 1990 she played a sinister housekeeper in Murder She Wrote.

Her autobiography, In the Shadow of a Star (a reference to the dominance of Bette Davis at Warners), remains unpublished.

Tom Vallance