Biography for
Rose Stradner More at IMDbPro »

Date of Birth

31 July 1913, Vienna, Austria

Date of Death

27 September 1958, Mount Kisco, New York, USA (suicide by overdose)

Birth Name

Rosa Stradner

Mini Biography

Pretty, soulful-eyed Austrian actress Rose Stradner was a rising 30s ingénue on the Viennese stage and in a few German film romances and musicals when MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer, who was in Europe searching for exotic talent, discovered Rose. Along with Greer Garson, Ilona Massey and Hedy Lamarr, she was brought to Hollywood and groomed as a foreign import. Making her U.S. debut as Edward G. Robinson's put-upon wife in The Last Gangster (1937), she showed promise. Her second film Blind Alley (1939), which was more Freudian in nature, starred Chester Morris as a psychologically-disturbed mobster who abducts psychiatrist Ralph Bellamy. Rose had less to do in this picture. The budding star met well-known writer/producer/director Joseph L. Mankiewicz at around this time and her career was placed on hold. The couple married in 1939 had two sons. One of them Christopher Mankiewicz, who was born a year later, went on to become a modest film producer in the 1980s. Although Rose returned for a small but key role as a Mother Superior in her husband's film The Keys of the Kingdom (1944), her career was officially over after only three films. She did not take to being strictly a "hausfrau" easily, however, and she soon turned to alcohol. A lethal mix of bitterness and depression set in and on September 27, 1958, she took her own life with an overdose of sleeping pills in her Mt. Kisco, New York, residence. She was only 45.

IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net

Spouse

Joseph L. Mankiewicz

(31 July 1939 - 27 September 1958) (her death) 2 children

Trivia

It is said that the famed birthday party scene ("Fasten your seat belts...it's going to be a bumpy night!") with a tipsy, vitriolic Margo Channing in husband Mankiewicz's classic film All About Eve (1950) was "inspired" by a very despondent and unhappy Rose.

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