Marion Martin - biography

Dubbed "Hollywood's blonde menace," brassy, curvaceous Marion Martin (born Marion Suplee) was the daughter of a well-to-do Bethlehem Steel executive and reared in Main Line society. She attended exclusive schools until the family fortune was wiped out in the stock market crash of 1929. Forced to work, she found employment as a chorine in one of Earl Carroll's New York stage revues. Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. got a gander at the dazzling beauty and signed her to replace Gypsy Rose Lee in his Follies of 1933 wearing little but "a feather and some beads." After a few other fetching Broadway appearances, she was signed by Universal in 1938 and adopted the stage name of Marion (or sometimes Marian) Martin. At first superfluously put in short films, she received her big break in Sinners in Paradise (1938), a downed-plane-on-a-desert-island adventure which emphasized her physical attributes. Quickly pigeonholed as a stripper, chorus girl or brazen, gold-digger type, her feline roles actually belied her off-camera personality as a shy, intelligent and chic lady. In the 1940s Marion played sexy foils to the Marx Brothers and dug up a few support roles in mostly secondary features. Her career, never rising above the "B"-level ranks, pretty much ended by the 1950s. She happily retired in 1951 and found stability in marriage, donating much of her time to charitable causes. She died 13 August 1985, in Santa Monica, California;  and she is buried in Holy Cross Cemetery. Culver City, California. Although she was often cast as a brassy stripper, showgirl or tough gun moll, off screen she was known to be extremely shy and retiring.