Date of Birth
13 January 1914,
Copenhagen, Denmark
Date of Death
2 January 2006, Santa Monica, California, USA (complications following surgery)
Birth Name
Aase Madsen
Height
5' 6" (1.68 m)
Mini Biography
Osa Massen (born Aase Madsen) was a newspaper photographer with an ambition to become a film editor. Prolific Danish film director Alice O'Fredericks gave her a role in her film Kidnapped in 1935.
After only two films in Denmark she was given a screen test by 20th Century Fox and arrived in Hollywood in 1936.
As at 2004, Osa Madsen Vogel lives in a suburb of the Danish capital, Copenhagen.
IMDb Mini Biography By:
MW Copenhagen
Mini Biography
Luck and timing can be everything in a career and in glamorous, sultry-eyed Osa Massen's case, it afforded her the opportunity of a brief but enjoyable 1940s film celebrity during WWII Hollywood. She was born Aase Madsen on January 13, 1915 (some sources indicate 1916) in Copenhagen, and received early training as a news photographer with special designs on becoming a film editor. It seems the aspiring young photographer was a natural for the other side of the lens as well for Swedish-born writer/director Alice O'Fredericks saw something in the teenager, who had no experience whatsoever, to cast her in a major role in her film. Osa was prominently featured in the Danish-made Kidnapped (1935/I), a family comedy which (obviously) had nothing to do with the Robert Louis Stevenson classic. After making a second Danish film, she was noticed by Hollywood scouts, who just happened to out hunting for alluring overseas imports, and practically handed a Twentieth Century-Fox contract. Luck and timing.
Encouraged by the success and near-mythological status that Greta Garbo was achieving, Hollywood was clamoring to find aloof foreign lovelies and turn them into stars. Osa was one of many brought over, which included Anna Sten, Signe Hasso, Sigrid Gurie, Gwili Andre, and, of course, Ingrid Bergman. All but the dazzling Bergman went on to eek out at least a decent "B" level career. Although Osa never became a top star, this semi-great Dane certainly had her share of chances. An occasional co-star, she more often than not took a back seat to the star. She made a promising American debut as part of a romantic triangle along with Fred MacMurray and Madeleine Carroll in the light comedy Honeymoon in Bali (1939) playing an exotic party girl. Down the line, however, she would make a more of an impact in an unsympathetic vein. One of her best was the taut melodrama A Woman's Face (1941), in which she played Melvyn Douglas's unfaithful wife who was being blackmailed by an embittered Joan Crawford. She and Crawford manage a great confrontational scene in which all claws are bared. By this time Warner Bros. Studios had taken over Osa's contract. She played a tempting foreign immigrant who breaks up George Montgomery's marriage in Accent on Love (1941) and another mistress with a motive in the Fred Astaire / Rita Hayworth musical confection You'll Never Get Rich (1941), this time hooking up with married Robert Benchley. In between the frothy dialog, Osa danced to the tune of "So Near and Yet So Far".
She more than fit the "shady lady" bill in the espionage tale The Devil Pays Off (1941), and in standard war themes such as Background to Danger (1943), Jack London (1943), The Master Race (1944) and Tokyo Rose (1946). She played sister to skating legend Sonja Henie in one of the star's popular hard-water musicals, and scored quite well with critics in the topnotch post-war film noir Deadline at Dawn (1946). At one point of her career her stage name was being confused with that of glamorous Hungarian actress Ilona Massey and/or American redhead Ona Munson (Belle Watling in Gone with the Wind (1939)). While making the picture Million Dollar Weekend (1948) Osa was goaded on by co-star Gene Raymond to change her name to the very American-sounding "Stefanie Paull." Not a great move. She wisely went back to "Osa Massen" in her very next picture Night Unto Night (1949). Moving into the 1950s, Rocketship X-M (1950), a pioneer sci-fi thriller, was one of her last pictures as she focused more and more on the new medium -- TV. Appearing on such series as "Wagon Train" and "Perry Mason," she returned to movie-making just one more time, playing a German frau in Outcasts of the City (1958).
As mysterious as the femme fatales she played, the lovely Osa made a Garbo-like exit from the limelight in 1962. Divorced in the early 1940s from minor actor Allan Hersholt, the son of noted character star and humanitarian Jean Hersholt, Osa was widowed a decade later by her second husband, a Beverly Hills physician. A third marriage to a Hollywood dentist also ended in divorce. She eventually went back to live in her homeland for a time, but again returned to the Los Angeles area and died on January 2, 2006, in Santa Monica. So obscure and forgotten was she that her death was not even reported in the Hollywood papers until well over a month later.
IMDb Mini Biography By:
Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Spouse
Trivia
Osa Massen's name is often confused with that of the actress Ona Munson.
Because she was often confused with actresses Ilona Massey and Ona Munson, she changed her stage name to Stefanie Paull for one movie, but reverted back to Osa Massen for her next film.
Married three times, her last husband was a dentist (divorced).
Played femme fatales and other ladies with secrets in war-era Hollywood.
Was once a newspaper photographer.
After retiring from the screen, she served on the foreign film selection committee for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.
She met second husband Dr. Harvey Cummins while volunteering for the Red Cross. He was involved in army medical work. They married in 1947 but he died only 18 months later.
Her expert multi-lingual skills had her sidelining as a dialect coach throughout much of her career. She worked with John Wayne on his Swedish accent and Thomas Mitchell on his Irish in The Long Voyage Home (1940).
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