Lillian West

Biography

A Bronx-bred spark named Lillian West first drew breath on 15 March 1886, and the city’s sidewalks became her first rehearsal space. By the early talkie era she had traded tenement stairwells for camera cranes, slipping into scene-stealing turns as the watchful dormitory mistress in Girls’ Dormitory (1936), the wary socialite stalked by hypnotic menace in Sinister Hands (1932), and the cool nurse who sizes up Robert Mitchum’s paranoia in Where Danger Loves (1950). Off-screen she collected surnames the way other people collected ticket stubs—Ed Brady, production manager S. T. Klawans, and finally John Floyd Parker each shared a marquee moment as her husband. On 23 April 1970 the curtain rang down in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, closing a life that had marched from gas-lamp New York to sun-baked California soundstages without ever dimming its restless, restless glow.