Biography

Eve Arden

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Overview

Born
April 30, 1908 · Mill Valley, California, USA
Died
November 12, 1990 · Los Angeles, California, USA (cardiac arrest and arteriosclerotic heart disease)
Birth name
Eunice Marion Quedens
Height
5′ 7½″ (1.71 m)

Biography

Eve Arden was born Eunice Mary Quedens in Mill Valley, California (near San Francisco), and was interested in show business from an early age. At 16, she made her stage debut after quitting school to join a stock company. After appearing in minor roles in two films under her real name, Eunice Quedens, she found that the stage offered her the same minor roles. By the mid 30s, one of these minor roles would attract notice as a comedy sketch in the stage play "Ziegfeld Follies".

By that time, she had changed her name to Eve Arden, which she adopted while looking over some cosmetics and spotting the names "Evening in Paris" and "Elizabeth Arden". In 1937, she garnered some attention with a small role in Oh, Doctor (1937), which led to her being cast in a minor role in the film Stage Door (1937). By the time the film was finished, her part had expanded into the wise-cracking, fast-talking friend to the lead. She would play virtually the character for most of her career.

While her sophisticated wise-cracking would never make her the lead, she would be a busy actress in dozens of movies over the next dozen years. In At the Circus (1939), she was the acrobatic Peerless Pauline opposite Groucho Marx and the Russian sharp shooter in the comedy The Doughgirls (1944). For her role as Ida in Mildred Pierce (1945), she received an Academy Award nomination. Famous for her quick ripostes, this led to work in Radio during the 1940s. In 1948, CBS Radio premiered "Our Miss Brooks", which would be the perfect show for her character. As her film career began to slow, CBS would take the popular radio show to television in 1952. The television series Our Miss Brooks (1952) would run through 1956 and led to the movie Our Miss Brooks (1956).

When the show ended, Arden tried another television series, The Eve Arden Show (1957), but it was soon canceled. In the 1960s, Arden raised a family and did a few guest roles, until her come-back television series The Mothers-In-Law (1967). This show, co-starring Kaye Ballard ran for two seasons. After that, she would make more unsold pilots, a couple of television movies and a few guest shots. She returned in occasional cameo appearances including as Principal McGee in Grease (1978), and Warden June in Pandemonium (1982).
- IMDb mini biography by: Tony Fontana <tony.fontana@spacebbs.com>

Family

Spouses
Children
Parents

Trademarks

Her husky voice
Often played sarcastic, wise cracking characters

Trivia

While appearing in a stage play, during one performance she was about to launch into her big speech, as a wife berating her husband, when the prop telephone on the set rang. Correctly deducing that this was a practical joke arranged by the actor playing the husband, she grabbed up the phone, and without missing a beat ad-libbed along the lines of "Well, he's busy ... He really can't ... oh, very well ..." and then turned to her grinning cohort and wiped the smile off his face by snapping "It's for you!" and handing him the phone. She stood there tapping her foot while he ad-libbed a rather unconvincing conversation, and then, after he hung up, went on with the scene as if nothing had happened.
Often disguised her true age, but her tombstone was engraved by her family with the years "1908-1990", so she was 82 at her death.
Was a longtime friend of Jane Wyman, who attended her funeral in 1990. Arden guest-starred opposite Wyman on Falcon Crest (1981).
Eve Arden was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 1995.
She has appeared in three films that have been selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant: Mildred Pierce (1945), Anatomy of a Murder (1959) and Grease (1978).

Quotes

I've worked with a lot of great glamorous girls in movies and the theater. And I'll admit, I've often thought it would be wonderful to be a femme fatale. But then I'd always come back to thinking that if they only had what I've had - a family, real love, an anchor - they would have been so much happier during all the hours when the marquees and the floodlights are dark.