TOMBSTONE TRIBUTES

Marie Windsor
by: Adriana Baeza

   Marie Windsor or "Miss Queen of the B's" was a beautiful actress who drove men to the edge;  her heavily lidded eyes drove our Western heroes crazy.

    She was born Emily Marie Bertelson on December 11, 1922.  As a teenager, she won two local beauty pageants.  Windsor studied drama at Brigham Young University, then moved to Hollywood and worked as a cigarette girl at the Macambo Nightclub where producer Arthur Hornblow discovered her and offered a screen test.

    Ms. Windsor sang for a time at MGM, but acting was what she loved doing best.  She worked in dozens of studio films in the 1940s, including The Killing, Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy and The Three Musketeers.

    One of Ms. Windsor's greatest Westerns was Hellfire with "Wild" Bill Elliot.  She also played alongside John Wayne in Cahill, U.S. Marshal, The Fighting Kentuckian, and non-Western Trouble Along the Way.  Ms. Windsor also earned her Western spurs by appearing in such TV Westerns as Rawhide, Gunsmoke, Yancy Derringer and Cheyenne.

    Off-screen, Marie Windsor was a painter, sculptor, and served as a director of the Screen Actors Guild.  Her beauty and talent will be missed.