Lola Albright

 

Lola Jean Albright (July 20, 1924 – March 23, 2017) was an American singer and actress, best known for playing the sultry singer Edie Hart, the girlfriend of private eye Peter Gunn, on all three seasons of the TV series Peter Gunn. 

Albright was born in Akron, Ohio, to Marion A. (née Harvey) and John Paul Albright, both of whom were gospel music singers. Lola's mother also was born in Ohio but her father was a native of North Dakota, who in 1930 supported the family by working as an inspector in a local insulating business.^[1][2]

Albright attended King Grammar School and graduated from West High School in Akron in 1942.^[3][4] She sang in public at a young age and studied piano for 20 years. Beginning when she was 15 years old, she worked after school as a receptionist at radio station WAKR in Akron.^[5] She left WAKR at the age of 18 and moved to Cleveland, taking a job as a stenographer at WTAM radio. Her first radio performance came on WJW in Cleveland.^[3] Moving to Chicago, she worked as a photographer's model and was discovered by a talent scout, which led to her moving to Hollywood at the age of 23.

Albright made her motion-picture debut with a small singing role in the 1947 musical comedy The Unfinished Dance, and then appeared the following year in two Judy Garland movies: The Pirate and Easter Parade. She first gained studio and public notice in the 1949 film noir production Champion with her portrayal of the wife of a manipulative boxing manager; she falls for a prizefighter played by Kirk Douglas.^[7] For the next several years, she appeared in secondary roles in over 20 films, including several B Westerns. Among them was a co-starring role in the slapstick comedy The Good Humor Man in 1950 with future husband Jack Carson.

Some of the films in which Albright appeared were Tulsa (1949), starring Susan Hayward; The Silver Whip (1953), in which she played Dale Robertson's love interest; and The Tender Trap (1955), in which she was one of several women trying to trap a bachelor, played by Frank Sinatra, into marriage.

In the early 1950s, Albright was also a frequent model for pinup painter Gil Elvgren.^[8]

A Cold Wind in August

In 1961, she starred in Alexander Singer's A Cold Wind in August – a low-budget, black-and-white, independent film – as a divorced burlesque show stripper in her 30s who becomes involved in a torrid romance with a 17-year-old boy.^[7] Critic Pauline Kael offered high praise for Albright's performance.^[9] In 1985, The New York Times also lauded Albright's acting in the film.^[10] With respect to her personal assessment of her role in A Cold Wind in August, Albright said in 1961, "Some people come up to me and say, 'Lola, you shouldn't play that kind of part. It isn't you.' Well, I count to 10, bite my tongue, and then tell them that I'm an actress: I don't want to play myself."^[11]

Later films

Her performance in A Cold Wind in August gave fresh impetus to her film career, leading to roles in Elvis Presley's musical Kid Galahad in 1962, in which she played the hard-boiled, long-time girlfriend of a cynical boxing manager played by Gig Young, and in French director René Clément's Joy House as a wealthy widow with a passion for handing out meals to the poor (albeit with an ulterior motive). In Lord Love a Duck (1966) she portrayed a cocktail waitress who turns suicidal when she thinks she has ruined her daughter Tuesday Weld's life. The next year, she was in the Western epic The Way West.

She gave up her feature-film career in 1968 after completing her work in The Impossible Years, a generation-gap farce in which she performed as Alice Kingsley, the despairing wife of a professor of psychiatry played by David Niven and the mother of two teenaged daughters.  Wikipedia