( b. Nov 20, 1919 Portland, Maine, USA - d. Aug 14, 2012 Longwood, Florida, USA ) Female
Frequently praised for bringing a quiet intelligence to her roles, Ms. Thaxter made her movie debut in 1944 in “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo,” Mervyn LeRoy’s film based on the true story of the first American bombing raid of Tokyo, led by Lt. Col. James Doolittle, played by Spencer Tracy.
Thaxter's father, Sidney, was a state supreme court justice; her mother, Phyllis Schuyler, was a Shakespearean actress and a journalist. Ms. Thaxter studied at the Montreal Repertory Theater in the 1930s and made her way to Broadway, where Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne hired her as an understudy.
During the 1950s Ms. Thaxter began a prolific television career. Among the dozens of shows on which she appeared were “Wagon Train,” “The Twilight Zone,” “The Fugitive” and “Murder, She Wrote.”
Under contract to MGM and then Warner Brothers, Ms. Thaxter acted in more than a dozen other films in the 1940s and early 1950s, often cast as the loyal, wholesome girl standing by her troubled or imperiled man.
