Brenda Marshal in The Seahawk

More information about this item and Brenda Marshal autographs is here; The Seahawk

Brenda Marshall wanted to be a film actress, all right; it's just that she didn't want to be Brenda Marshall. Throughout her years in Hollywood, she insisted that her friends and co-workers address her not by her studio-fabricated cognomen, but by her given name of Ardis Anderson Gaines. A Warner Bros. contractee of the early 1940s, Anderson/Marshall did her best work opposite Errol Flynn in The Sea Hawk (1940) and Footsteps in the Dark (1941). From 1941 through 1973, Brenda Marshall was married to actor William Holden, a curious union that evidently soured early on (Holden's friends blamed Marshall, and vice versa), and was distinguished by extended separations and numerous extracurricular romances.

Born Ardis Ankerson Gaines in Negros, Philippines, Marshall made her first film appearance in the 1939 Espionage Agent. The following year she played the leading lady to Errol Flynn in The Sea Hawk but after a few well received parts, she married the actor William Holden in 1941 and her own career quickly declined.

The Constant Nymph (1943) was a popular success but she virtually retired after this, appearing in only four more inconsequential films. After many long separations, Marshall and Holden were divorced in 1971, and Marshall died from throat cancer in Palm Springs, California at the age of 76.