After several years' worth of stage and film appearances in England, actress Evelyn Ankers came to Broadway in 1940 to appear in Ladies in Retirement. Besieged by offers from Hollywood, Evelyn chose to work at 20th Century-Fox, but production delays in her first American film led to her signing a contract with Universal Pictures. Despite her British upbringing, Evelyn was cast as the all-American heroine in her premiere Hollywood film, Abbott and Costello's Hold That Ghost (1941). With her co-starring stint in The Wolf Man (1941), Evelyn began her tenure as Universal's resident horror heroine, possessed of a blood-curdling scream. She also appeared in two Sherlock Holmes films, playing a villainess with a penchant for disguise in the second Holmes effort The Pearl of Death (1944). During the war years, the multilingual Ms. Ankers (who was born in Chile to British parents) starred in a radio program in Argentina. After her film career petered out, Evelyn appeared on several TV shows, most notably co-starring with Buster Keaton and Joe E. Brown in "The Silent Partner," a 1955 episode of Screen Director's Playhouse. Retired since the mid-1960s, Evelyn Ankers spent her last decades with her husband, actor and Lutheran lay minister Richard Denning, in their lavish home in Hawaii.
by Hal Erickson
biography
