Biography

Dee Hartford was born in Salt Lake City as Donna Lee Higgins to Edgar Higgins and Beatrice (Thomas) Higgins. She started out in the late 1940s as a model for Vogue magazine in New York. Her sister Eden Hartford (born Eden Marie Higgins) (Groucho Marx's wife from 1954 to 1969) followed a similar career path. Her film career was stillborn in the wake of a small part in RKO's A Girl in Every Port (1952), but she did feature in a few well-remembered guest spots on the small screen in the 1960s. In addition to being Groucho's sister-in-law, Dee was the third wife of director Howard Hawks (who was almost thirty years her senior). Still more consequential, career-wise, was her acquaintance with film maker Irwin Allen who was also a close friend of Groucho.

Tall, photogenic and beautiful, but also hard-edged, her best-remembered role may have been as the shrewish virago of a wife and mother in The Bewitchin' Pool (1964) (the last episode to air of the original Twilight Zone series) whose brief and intermittent expressions of maternal concern are far too few, and ultimately, too late. Her appearances on Perry Mason (1957) were also of jaggedly harsh characters.

She was prone to pop up in several of Allen's TV projects: as the android Verda and as Nancy Pi Squared in Lost in Space (1965) (along with Groucho, she had invested money in the series); as Helen of Troy in The Time Tunnel (1966) and as a scientist's wife in Land of the Giants (1968). Aficionados will also recall her as the fetching Miss Iceland opposite Otto Preminger's "Mr. Freeze" in Batman (1966), her classy Jackie Kennedy-lookalike politician's wife in an episode of The Outer Limits (1963), and as fashion model "Chu-Chu" in The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. (1966).

Following her marriage to wealthy Stuart Warren Cramer III in 1972 (ex-husband of Jean Peters and Terry Moore), she settled down to family life in California and dropped out of the limelight. Dee Hartford died in Palm Desert, California, on October 21 2018 at the age of 90.
- IMDb mini biography by: I.S.Mowis