Lynn Baggett

Tall, regal, sultry-eyed, flame-haired (later blonde) Lynn Baggett is better remembered for her turbulent, unhappy private life than for her "B" level acting roles. Born Ruth Baggett in Wichita Falls, Texas, on May 10, 1923, her father, David L., was in the oil business and her mother, the former Ruth Simmons, a stenographer. While in Dallas following her high school graduation, the pretty teenager was discovered by a Warner Bros. agent and signed. As a girl with no experience, the studio promoted Lynn (sometimes billed Lynne) as a beauty queen and titleholder ("The Cobra Girl," "The Triple A Girl," etc.) while paying her dues in a slew of unbilled sexy starlet bits as chorines, nurses, waitresses, singers and party girl types. For five long years she toiled obscurely in such WWII-era films as Manpower (1941), Air Force (1943), The Adventures of Mark Twain (1944), Roughly Speaking (1945), Mildred Pierce (1945) and Night and Day (1946). The studio did little to increase her stature in Hollywood and she eventually was released from her contract in 1946. After signing with Universal, she finally received her first role of substance in The Time of Their Lives (1946), an above average Abbott and Costello haunted house comedy vehicle. Following her marriage to the Austro-Hungarian producer Sam Spiegel ("On the Waterfront") in 1948, she acted less frequently, showing up in a few secondary roles with the classic film noir D.O.A. (1949), probably her best remembered role as a shady lady/widow of mystery, and in The Flame and the Arrow (1950) and The Mob (1951) her most prominent. The Spiegel/Baggett marriage was quite stormy, marred by adultery and nasty fighting. They separated in 1952. Three years later she finally received a divorce. With her career now in shambles, Lynn found work as an Arthur Murray dance teacher. In 1954, she was the direct cause of a fatal two-car accident in which a 9-year-old boy, on his way home from a summer camping excursion, was killed. Another young boy in the same car was seriously injured. Overcome by fear and acute anguish, she "blacked out" and was later charged with leaving the scene of an accident. She was convicted of felony hit-and-run. A failed acting comeback led to severe depression, mental problems and acute substance abuse. She attempted suicide by pills in 1959 before succeeding a year later on March 22, 1960, dying of acute barbiturate intoxication. She had been released from a private sanitarium several weeks earlier. She was interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park. Never close to showing her true potential, Lynn(e) Baggett became one of Hollywood's sadder statistics.