Tuulikki Paananen

Biography

Tuulikki Paananen had a short but an impressive career as an actress. Her father was a Finnish concert violinist and her mother an accompanist from Michigan USA, an area with fairly heavy Finnish population. Tuulikki was born in Finland but the family returned to the USA in 1919. She lived in there until 1935 but then returned to Finland to star in a few most well known films of that era (like "Jääkärin morsian" and "Varastettu kuolema"). When WWII had reached Finland in 1940 she moved back to the United States to stay. Under the name of "Tula Parma" she worked in a few Hollywood productions but her only bigger role on the silver screen was in Jacques Tourneur's "The Leopard Man" (1943). She then returned to dancing, her other passion in her youth, and opened a dance studio and also performed as a dancer herself. Later she lived in Honolulu where she also died in 1974.