Amelita Ward (July 17, 1923 – April 26, 1987) was an American

film actress An actor or actress is a person who portrays a character in a performance. The actor performs "in the flesh" in the traditional medium of the theatre or in modern media such as film, radio, and television. The analogous Greek term is (), li ...

. She played

supporting role A supporting character is a character in a narrative that is not the focus of the primary storyline, but is important to the plot/protagonist, and appears or is mentioned in the story enough to be more than just a minor character or a cameo ap ...

s in over 20 films between 1943 and 1949, generally in

B Pictures A B movie or B film is a low-budget commercial motion picture. In its original usage, during the Golden Age of Hollywood, the term more precisely identified films intended for distribution as the less-publicized bottom half of a double feature ...

such as ''

Gangway for Tomorrow Broadly speaking, a gangway is a passageway through which to enter or leave. Gangway may refer specifically refer to: Passageways * Gangway (nautical), a passage between the quarterdeck and the forecastle of a ship, and by extension, a passage th ...

'' and '' The Falcon in Danger'' (1943). She was sometimes credited as Lita Ward.

Life and career

Ward's father was Claude "Bud" Ward, a production manager for

NBC The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) is an American English-language commercial broadcast television and radio network. The flagship property of the NBC Entertainment division of NBCUniversal, a division of Comcast, its headquarters are l ...

. Two producers discovered Ward while they were in Harlingen, Texas, filming scenes on location. That led to her first film role, in ''

Aerial Gunner ''Aerial Gunner'' is a 1943 American black-and-white World War II propaganda film produced by William C. Thomas and William H. Pine, who also directed. The film stars Chester Morris, Richard Arlen, and Jimmy Lydon. This was the first feature fi ...

'' (1943). Ward married

Leo Gorcey Leo Bernard Gorcey (June 3, 1917– June 2, 1969) was an American stage and film actor, famous for portraying the leader of a group of hooligans known variously as the Dead End Kids, the East Side Kids and, as adults, The Bowery Boys. Gorcey was ...

on February 10, 1949, in Ensenada, Mexico. They had two children and later divorced in February 1956.

Filmography

References

Bibliography

* Fyne, Robert. ''Long Ago and Far Away: Hollywood and the Second World War''. Scarecrow Press, 2008.

External links

* 1923 births 1987 deaths American film actresses People from Morgan County, West Virginia Actresses from West Virginia 20th-century American actresses {{US-film-actor-1920s-stub