Elena Verdugo

Elena Verdugo

actress, soundtrack

Elena Verdugo was born on Apr 20, 1925 in USA. Elena Verdugo's big-screen debut came with Down Argentine Way directed by Irving Cummings in 1940. Elena Verdugo is known for Suburban Beat directed by Michael Vejar, Dee Wallace stars as Joanna Morgan and Shelley Fabares as Mimi Gluskin. Elena Verdugo has got 2 awards and 4 nominations so far. The most recent award Elena Verdugo achieved is Image Awards (NAACP). The upcoming new movie Elena Verdugo plays is Suburban Beat which will be released on Aug 17, 1985.

Most baby-boomers remember actress Elena Verdugo from her pleasant, plain but rather dowdy Emmy-nominated role as "Consuelo Lopez", the altruistic assistant and sometime aide-de-camp to Robert Young's general practitioner for several seasons on the popular Docteur Marcus Welby (1969) dramatic series. However, decades before donning her drab white nurse's hat, she was an alluring 40s Universal player who displayed her best assets in their "B" adventure yarns and horror opuses. One who was probably wise to keep a set of hoop earrings nearby at all times, Elena reliably hauled out a reliable number of gypsies, harem dancers, peasant girls, Indian maidens and senoritas over the years before TV instigated the second stretch of her career.Elena was born April 20, 1925, in Paso Robles, California, and began putting on dance shoes as a kindergartener. At age 6, she made her movie debut in the western Cavalier of the West (1931) starring Harry Carey, but didn't come back to films until her teen years. She nominally provided exotic footwork for such movies as Sous le ciel d'Argentine (1940) with Betty Grable and Carmen Miranda, the Tyrone Power starrer Arènes sanglantes (1941), and the war picture Les rivages de Tripoli (1942), among others. She received her first big break featured as the object of desire of George Sanders's impressionist painter Paul Gauguin in The Moon and Sixpence (1942).Universal used her consistently in the mid- to late-40s, starting her off as the touching and vulnerable gypsy girl "Ilonka" in the multiple monster bash La Maison de Frankenstein (1944) which featured the holy horror trinity of Dracula, the Werewolf and Frankenstein's Monster. A natural blonde who got plenty of wear out of the dark wigs handed to her for these kinds of roles, her best scenes in the movie were with the doomed lycanthropic "Larry Talbot", played by Lon Chaney Jr.. She went on to appear with Chaney again in The Frozen Ghost (1945). While filming the Abbott and Costello comedy Deux nigauds vendeurs (1946), she met and married movie writer Charles R. Marion, who also wrote for the comedy duo's radio show. The couple had one son, Richard Marion, who later became an actor/director in his own right. A real trooper despite her stereotype, Elena forged on in nothing-special "easterns" (i.e., Schéhérazade (1947); La revanche d'Ali Baba (1952)) and westerns (i.e., El Dorado Pass (1948); The Big Sombrero (1949)) playing whatever ethnic the script called for.Television became a reality in the early 1950s. She found herself in a major sitcom hit playing a Brooklyn-born secretary for four seasons on Meet Millie (1952), initially replacing Audrey Totter in the lead role on radio. Elena retired for a time after this but eventually returned to perform on the occasional musical stage and on the small screen. After her big success as the nurse/receptionist on the "Welby" series, she slowed down considerably, but she and Young did reunite on The Return of Marcus Welby, M.D. (1984), sans the other series' star, James Brolin, a decade later.Verdugo, who later married psychiatrist Charles Rosey Rosewall after her divorce from writer Marion, has since appeared occasionally at nostalgia-based film/TV conventions. In 1999, she suffered the loss of her only child, actor/director Richard Marion, to a heart attack. He was only 50. She survived her second husband, who died in 2012, by five years, dying at age 92 on May 30, 2017, in Los Angeles.

  • Birthday

    Apr 20, 1925
  • Place of Birth

    Paso Robles, California, USA

Known For

Awards

2 wins & 4 nominations

Image Awards (NAACP)
1971
Best Performance by an Actress in a Dramatic Series or Miniseries or Television Movie
Winner - Image Award
Marcus Welby, M.D. (1969)
Walk of Fame
1960
Television
Winner - Star on the Walk of Fame

Movies & TV Shows

All
Movies
TV Shows