Hillary Brooke

Hillary Brooke's image as the epitome of glacial, regal, upper-class British gentility is muted somewhat by the fact that she was born Beatrice Peterson to a middle-class American family in Long Island, NY (she was the sister of Arthur Peterson, best-known as the demented "Major" in the soap-opera satire Soap (1977)). Always a beauty, she had a successful career as a photographer's model before breaking into show business. Her "British" accent came about when she realized that she was just one of innumerable tall, good-looking blondes vying for roles, and needed something to make her stand out among them. She came up with affecting a British accent and it worked; she began to get more and more roles that called for a "British" blonde, so she kept the accent. Her film debut was in New Faces of 1937 (1937), in which--billed as "Beatrice Schute"--she played a showgirl. She began working steadily in films in the early 1940s, and appeared in such major productions as The Philadelphia Story