Marjorie Riordan: Movies & Filmography

Marjorie Jane Riordan was an American actress, model, and clinical psychologist whose career spanned the golden age of Hollywood and beyond. Born on January 24, 1920, in Washington, D.C., she was raised in a family that later relocated to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she attended high school before studying drama for two years at the University of Wisconsin from 1937 to 1939. She then moved to Los Angeles, California, where her fascination with the nearby motion picture studios prompted her to seek work in the film industry, initially taking a job as a doctor's secretary and assistant while searching for acting roles on the side. After making uncredited appearances in films and working as a model, she landed her first small role as Wendie Holmes in the wartime melodrama Parachute Nurse (1942), credited as Marjorie Reardon. She was subsequently signed as a contract player by Hollywood producer Sol Lesser after approaching him about potential roles, making her official studio debut in the morale-boosting musical revue picture Stage Door Canteen (1943), where she played Jean, the love interest of Lon McCallister's character "California," alongside other newly contracted players including Margaret Early, Sunset Carson, and Cheryl Walker. Her contract was later transferred to Warner Bros., where she was cast as Bette Davis's daughter Fanny Jr. in the acclaimed drama Mr. Skeffington (1944), followed by a notable role opposite Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce in the Universal Pictures Sherlock Holmes mystery Pursuit to Algiers (1945), where she performed both acting and singing duties. Throughout the war years, Riordan actively participated in USO canteen activities, Red Cross and Navy fundraising campaigns to support the construction of the cruiser USS Los Angeles, and was even honored by the California Department of Motor Vehicles on June 25, 1945, with the title of "Share-the-Ride-Girl" to promote carpooling for the war effort, while her modeling experience and film visibility also led to her being promoted as a pin-up beauty among GIs. She continued to appear in supporting film roles into the 1950s, including Three Strangers (1946), South of Monterey (1946), and The Hoodlum (1951), as well as an episode of the television series Racket Squad, while simultaneously pursuing graduate studies in speech pathology that later evolved into a study of clinical psychology. Ultimately developing a successful second career as a clinical psychologist, she eventually gave up acting altogether. In her personal life, while entertaining at a servicemen's canteen event, she met Marine Major George T. Lumpkin, whom she married in 1945 before later divorcing; she subsequently married Allan Schlaff, a PhD fellow clinical psychologist, on February 21, 1958, and the couple had one son, John A. Schlaff. Allan Schlaff died in 1972, and Riordan passed away on March 8, 1984, from breast cancer at the age of 64, with her final resting place being Westwood Village Memorial Park.