Biography

Marie Windsor (born Emily Marie Bertelsen) was born in Marysvale, Utah, and attended Brigham Young University. She trained for the stage under Maria Ouspenskaya before she began playing leading roles in B pictures in the late 1940s. So many B films in fact, that she garnered the title of 'Queen of the Bs'.

She was a talent - to paraphrase a cliché - of the right type and the right time. If film noir could have manufactured an archetype, it would most definitely have been Marie.

With Ms. Windsor's bedroom eyes ('they didn't fit for a 'goody-goody wife, or a nice little girlfriend') she smoldered on screens, in scenes with John Garfield and many others, in some of her best work. Marie's femme fatale (Ms. Windsor was later quoted as saying a femme fatale is '...usually the woman who gets the man into bed... then into trouble') was on screen, most notably her role as the manipulative, double-crossing wife of Elisha Cook Jr. in The Killing (1956) (which earned her "Look" magazine's Best Supporting Actress award).

Marie later said she loved playing them because they're '... the type of character audiences never forget'.

Some of her favorite film roles, in addition to The Killing, were The Narrow Margin (1952) and Hellfire (1949).

Marie was married twice before she met Jack Hupp, a realtor with whom she had a son. After retiring from films, Marie took up sculpting and painting.

Marie passed away one day before her 81st birthday. She's interred with her husband in her hometown.

Marie said audiences 'loved to hate her', but this is only partially true; audiences loved Ms. Windsor for the dynamism she portrayed, and as film noir gains new fans every day - more than ¾ of a century since its heyday - it's a love affair which shows no signs of abating.
- IMDb mini biography by: Tom Weaver <TomWeavr@aol.com> (Corrected and updated by U.N. Owen/and corrected again by Crit74)

[Stanley Kubrick] had a part for me in Lolita (1962) as Shelley Winters' best friend, but there was a problem in England with the EADY plan, and there was no way that they could squeeze me in. I haven't seen him in a long time, but we exchange Valentine's cards. I feel people have more time to think about it if they get a Valentine. Christmas is too crazy with other things.

I'm 5'9" and there were two stars in my life who didn't mind that I was taller than they--George Raft and John Garfield. Raft told me how to walk with him in a scene: We'd start off in a long shot normal, and about the time we got together in a close-up, I'd be bending my knees so I'd be shorter. I had to do a tango with Raft and I learned to dance in ballet shoes with my knees bent.