Louise La Planche

Louise LaPlanche was an American actress, model, and beauty queen whose career spanned nearly seven decades, bridging the silent film era with the Golden Age of Hollywood and extending into television during her later years. Born on September 6, 1919, she entered the entertainment world extraordinarily early, making her film debut at just three years old in the 1923 silent classic The Hunchback of Notre Dame, where she portrayed a gypsy girl alongside Lon Chaney. Along with her sister Rosemary LaPlanche, who would later be crowned Miss America in 1941, Louise relocated from Kansas to California with their mother, where the siblings became fixtures in the California beauty pageant circuit. Her striking looks and poise led to her being crowned Miss Catalina in 1939, a victory that proved pivotal as it secured her a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), one of the most powerful studios of the era. At MGM, she appeared in the celebrated 1940 musical Strike Up the Band, sharing the screen with legendary performers Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, establishing herself as a capable supporting actress during Hollywood's most glamorous period.

Following her tenure at MGM, LaPlanche transitioned to Paramount Studios, where she continued to build her resume with notable appearances in classic films such as Holiday Inn (1942), starring alongside Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby, and Road to Morocco (1942), in which she memorably appeared as a harem girl who painted Bob Hope's toenails. Beyond her film work, she worked as a model for her husband, Lester Freedman, a clothing manufacturer whom she married and with whom she had two children, Phil Freedman and Pat Freedman Johnston. After Freedman's death in 1984, when LaPlanche was sixty-five, she made a remarkable return to acting, transitioning to television with roles in various soap operas and popular series including The Golden Girls. In her final years, she moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she resided for fifteen years until her death on September 7, 2012, just one day after her ninety-third birthday. Her life was marked by extraordinary resilience; she survived multiple serious health crises, including breast cancer at age thirty, lung cancer at sixty despite never smoking, and colon cancer at ninety, demonstrating the same tenacity that had defined her long and varied career in entertainment.