Celebrated by movie publicist/historian John Springer as the first new star of the talkie era, Nancy Carroll enjoyed a thriving career long before the advent of the microphone. A stage performer from the age of 16, Nancy entered films in 1927, scoring a personal success with her ingenue turn in Abie's Irish Rose (1928). It was in this film--essentially a silent, with a few talking sequences added as an afterthought--that Nancy became the first Hollywood actress ever to sing and dance on a sound stage. From 1929 through 1931, Nancy was one of the brightest stars on the Paramount Pictures lot, headlining several musicals and light comedies, and exhibiting a fine flair for dramatics in such soap opera fare as Stolen Heaven (1931). Her career was irreparably damaged by the notorious flop The Night Angel (1931), and by the end of the 1930s Nancy was accepting undemanding secondary roles in films like There Goes My Heart (1938). Retiring from moviemaking in 1938, Nancy returned to the stage; she was a busy television actress in the 1950s and 1960s, at one point co-starring on a live sitcom, The Aldrich Family. Nancy Carroll died suddenly at the age of 61 while appearing with Bert Lahr in a Nyack, New York stage production of Never Too Late.
by Hal Erickson
biography
