Marilyn Maxwell

Actress and singer — introduced "Silver Bells"

• August 3, 1921 – March 20, 1972 · Actress, raised in Fort Wayne

On the record

She was born Marvel Marilyn Maxwell in Clarinda, Iowa, on 3 August. The year is genuinely in dispute: the standard modern references and the Iowa record give 1921, while a run of older film references and databases give 1920, and this page prints both rather than choose. After her parents divorced, her mother moved the family to Fort Wayne, and Fort Wayne is where Maxwell grew up. She attended Central High School and worked as an usher at the Rialto Theater, 2616 South Calhoun Street, a neighborhood house that had opened in 1924. The girl who tore tickets there in the mid-1930s left school in her sophomore year to sing with a dance band in Indianapolis.

The singing carried her. She worked as a radio singer while still a teenager and sang on stage with Ted Weems's orchestra. In 1942 she signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Louis B. Mayer had her drop "Marvel" from her billing, and as Marilyn Maxwell she made her film debut in Stand by for Action (1942), followed by Thousands Cheer (1943) and the Abbott and Costello picture Lost in a Harem (1944). She drew critical praise for the musical Summer Holiday (1948), played opposite Kirk Douglas in Champion (1949) and supported Clark Gable in Key to the City (1950), and reached the role she is remembered for at Paramount: "Brainey" Baxter in The Lemon Drop Kid (1951), opposite Bob Hope. In that film, shot in the summer of 1950 and released in March 1951, Maxwell and Hope first performed "Silver Bells," written for the picture by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans. It became a Christmas standard once Bing Crosby recorded it the next year, and its first voice on screen was the Fort Wayne usherette's.

The Hope connection ran through her working life. She toured widely with his USO shows in the Second World War and again in Korea, and turned up across his radio and television programs for years. Through the 1950s she worked steadily in television, on The Colgate Comedy Hour, The Red Skelton Hour, The Jimmy Durante Show and Playhouse 90, among others, appeared as the mystery guest on What's My Line in 1953, and acted in pictures including Rock-A-Bye Baby (1958) with Jerry Lewis. In the 1961-62 season she took a starring television role, Grace Sherwood, the diner owner of ABC's Bus Stop. She left the series after thirteen episodes, saying there was nothing for her to do but "pour a second cup of coffee and point the way to the men's room." Later films included Critic's Choice (1963), with Hope and Lucille Ball, and The Lively Set (1964). Her last screen appearance came in a 1971 episode of O'Hara, U.S. Treasury.

Maxwell married three times, each marriage ending in divorce: the actor John Conte, her Lost in a Harem co-star, in September 1944, dissolved in June 1946; the restaurateur Anders McIntyre, from 1 January 1950 to 23 March 1951; and the writer and producer Jerry Davis, from 1954 to 1960. Her only child, a son, Matthew, was born to Maxwell and Davis in 1956. She had been treated for hypertension and pulmonary disease, and on 20 March 1972 her fifteen-year-old son came home from school and found her dead in their Beverly Hills home. She was fifty, if the 1921 birth year holds; the death was reported as an apparent heart attack. The Fort Wayne years of her life rest chiefly on John Ankenbruck's Twentieth Century History of Fort Wayne (1975), page 308.

Find them on this page

• § 06 — people of the record · famous-people supplement

Sources:

1. John Ankenbruck, Twentieth Century History of Fort Wayne (Fort Wayne: Twentieth Century Historical Fort Wayne, Inc., 1975), p. 308.
2. Notes on Iowa (Iowa History Daily), "August 3: Iowa's Marilyn," 3 August 2023 (Clarinda birth; the Fort Wayne move; the Rialto; the 1942 MGM signing).
3. Indiana Music Makers, Marilyn Maxwell entry (carried from the previous version of this page).
4. Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana, "M Surnames of Allen County, Indiana," Maxwell entry, quoting Legendary Locals of Fort Wayne, p. 101.
5. "Marilyn Maxwell," Wikipedia, filmography, radio and television credits, marriages and death, checked November 2026 against the sources above.