Nancy Guild


Nancy Joan Guild was an American film actress of the 1940s and 1950s. She appeared in Somewhere in the Night, The Brasher Doubloon, and the comedy Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man. 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 for, and eventually gave up acting for marriage.

Film career

Guild was a University of Arizona freshman when a Life magazine photographer noticed her. After her picture was published in a spread on campus fashions, five Hollywood studios screen-tested her, and she was signed by 20th Century Fox. The studio's publicity writers declared "Guild rhymes with wild!" when hyping her first film, Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Somewhere in the Night.
On the rebound from an engagement with producer Edward Lasker, Guild married fellow Fox contract player Charles Russell in 1947. The following year, they appeared together in the musical Give My Regards to Broadway. They had a daughter, Elizabeth, in 1949.
in Somewhere in the Night
She left Fox and appeared in movies as a freelance and at Universal Studios, where she appeared in an Abbott and Costello picture and the Francis the Talking Mule movie Francis Covers the Big Town, her last picture.

Television

Guild was a panelist on the DuMont network's Where Was I? game show in 1952-1953.

Personal life

Having divorced Russell in 1950, on August 16, 1951, Guild married the Broadway impresario Ernest H. Martin, the producer of Guys and Dolls and later The Sound of Music and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. She appeared occasionally on television and briefly returned to the movies in Otto Preminger's Such Good Friends.
In 1975, she divorced Martin and married photojournalist John Bryson in 1978. She divorced Bryson in 1995.

Death

On August 16, 1999, Guild died of emphysema in East Hampton, New York, at the age of 73.

Filmography