Suzanne Kaaren: Movies & Filmography

Suzanne Kaaren (born Sophie Kischnerman on March 21, 1912) was an American B-movie actress and dancer who became known for her work in 1930s and 1940s stock film genres including horror films, westerns, comedies, and romances. A native of Brooklyn, New York City, she attended Erasmus Hall High School and later Hunter College, where she honed her talents before being signed by 20th Century Fox in September 1933. An accomplished athlete, Kaaren won the high-jump at a New York City school contest in 1931, though her parents refused to let her compete in the Olympic Games. Her hobbies included collecting butterflies, and she had several books filled with the insects. Before her film career, she worked as a model for commercial painters and cigarette advertising, performed with stock companies, and trained at the Hedgerow Theatre in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was also a Ziegfeld Girl and one of the original Rockettes, famously performing on stage on December 27, 1932, the night Radio City Music Hall opened. Kaaren left for Hollywood in October 1933 with a starting salary of $150 per week with Fox Films, and was eventually cast opposite Tim McCoy in Ridin' Gents, a Monogram Pictures production, before being signed by Republic Pictures to play a character in From Rags to Riches. She joined a troupe assembled by producer Walter Wanger called Trade Winds, which also included Gloria Youngblood, and appeared in the comedy When's Your Birthday? (1937) alongside the zany Joe E. Brown in an RKO Radio Pictures movie about an astrologer. Kaaren figured prominently in several Three Stooges comedy short films, including Disorder in the Court, Yes, We Have No Bonanza, and What's the Matador?, and in Miracles for Sale (1939), based on Clayton Rawson's novel Death From A Tophat, she played a woman who is separated into halves and then joined together again suspensefully. She starred opposite Bela Lugosi in The Devil Bat, a cult horror film from Poverty Row released by Producers Releasing Corporation, in which Lugosi breeds giant bats to attack people, and her final film appearance was an uncredited role as the Duchess of Park Avenue in 1984's The Cotton Club. On the stage, Kaaren stepped into the character usually played by Ann Thomas in a Broadway presentation of Chicken Every Sunday in September 1944, and in July 1946, her elder son Brewster appeared in the play with her as an eight-month-old. She married stage and screen actor Sidney Blackmer on June 13, 1943, in a civil ceremony in Santa Ana, California, with actress Raquel Torres serving as a witness. The marriage was turbulent from the outset, with the couple separating as early as September 1943 and Blackmer instructing his attorney to file for divorce in October, though they ultimately remained together until his death in October 1973, producing two sons named Brewster and Jonathen. In her later years, Kaaren became notable for refusing to vacate her rent-controlled Manhattan apartment at 100 Central Park South after real estate developer Donald Trump purchased the building and sought to convert the apartments into condominiums, and in 1998 a court ruled that while Trump could turn the apartments into condos, he had to allow the rent-controlled tenants to remain. Kaaren died from pneumonia on August 27, 2004, at the Lillian Booth Actors Home in Englewood, New Jersey, aged 92, and was laid to rest at Chestnut Hill Cemetery in Salisbury, North Carolina.