Nita Talbot

Despite being in just seven episodes, Nita Talbot is best remembered for her Emmy-nominated role as the crafty Russian spy Marya Parmanova in the iconic 60s wartime sitcom Hogan's Heroes (1965). Her character was the only one in the show capable of outmaneuvering Bob Crane's shrewd Colonel Hogan. Nita was born Anita Sokol of Hungarian/Jewish ancestry in the Bronx, New York. Determined to break into show business, she often accompanied her older sister, Gloria Stone, to auditions at the various studios. On one of these outings, she was spotted by a talent scout and signed under contract by Warner Brothers, making her screen debut, aged eighteen, in 1949. This was followed two years later with her first curtain call on Broadway. Sultry, blonde, husky-voiced and with her gray/green eyes, Nita was proclaimed by studio publicists to resemble Hollywood legend Lauren Bacall. With that in mind, she was usually cast during the early years of her career as hard-boiled, street-wise chicks and ambitious career girls. Nita's first recurring character role was that of Gloria in one of the first ever private detective serials, Man Against Crime (1949). She had to wait a decade for her next co-starring turn as an enterprising aide-de-camp to the star in The Jim Backus Show (1960), a sitcom which revolved around a second-rate news service. In addition to numerous anthology dramas, Nita regularly featured in prime time shows like Perry Mason (1957), The Thin Man (1957), Mike Hammer (1958), Johnny Staccato (1959) and Mr. Lucky (1959), often as gals named Blondie, Mimi, Narcissa, Kitten, Belle or Delilah (one cannot omit from this list her French Quarter nightclub singer and dancer 'Lusti Weather' in four episodes of Bourbon Street Beat (1959)). In Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974)'s The Werewolf, her Paula Griffin helped Darren McGavin take down the creature with the requisite silver bullets during a swinging sixties cruise. She was Mickey Rooney's ex-flame in an episode of The Fugitive (1963) and the pawn in a cat-and-mouse game between Peter Falk and Leonard Nimoy in the Columbo (1971) episode A Stitch in Time. Nita fared rather less well in Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955) (strangled), McCloud (1970) (poisoned), The Untouchables (1959) and Mannix (1967) (shot in both). In the 70s and 80s, Nita was co-star in a couple of half-hour sitcoms: as a conceited socialite and magazine editor in Here We Go Again (1973), and as Rose, the acerbic receptionist of veterinarian Bill Daily in Starting from Scratch (1988). She also featured as a semi-recurring character in the soap General Hospital (1963). Never short of work, Nita remained steadily engaged in television guest appearances right up to her retirement in 1997. Her roles on the big screen seem to have paralleled those on TV: nightclub singer 'Saturday Night' in Who's Got the Action? (1962), Sunny Daze in the Elvis beach party musical Girl Happy (1965), tycoon Roddy McDowall's Girl Friday (Dee Dee Howitzer!) in the perfectly awful comedy The Cool Ones (1967) and brassy Madam Esther in the blaxploitation western Buck and the Preacher (1972). She had a small part in the acclaimed satirical drama The Day of the Locust (1975) (set in 1930s Hollywood) as the pretentious and hedonistic Joan Schwartzen. The prolific Miss Talbot has racked up an impressive tally of 153 acting credits (according to IMDB). She was formerly married to actors Don Gordon and Thomas A. Geas. Both unions ended in divorce.