Carla Balenda, who starred alongside Dana Andrews and Claude Rains in the RKO Pictures thriller and portrayed ’s girlfriend on the NBC sitcom , has died. She was 98. Balenda, billed at times as Sally Bliss, her birth name, died April 9 of natural causes at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, her grandson Jim Martin told .
She also played a nurse on the 1955-56 syndicated series , starring Glen Gordon, and recurred as Miss Hazlitt, Timmy’s (Jon Provost) teacher, on CBS’ from 1958-63. In (1951), Balenda portrayed a woman who is aboard a fishing trawler bound for Newfoundland when she and the skipper (Andrews) wind up tangling in the North Atlantic with Nazis led by Rains’ character. She often said it was her favorite role.
When Rooney took his first crack at television, playing Mickey Mulligan — a clumsy page for a TV network who dreams of becoming a performer — on , she was his girlfriend, secretary Pat Harding. The 1954-55 series, created by and Richard Quine and also known as , lasted one season of 36 episodes. The daughter of a high school science teacher, Bliss was born in Carthage, New York, on Nov.
22, 1925. She attended Baldwin High School on Long Island and acting school in Rhode Island and did summer stock. She came to Hollywood at age 17 after signing with Columbia Pictures and appeared in such films as (1944), (1945) and (1945).
She got married and moved back to New York but returned to acting at RKO, where studio head Howard Hughes asked her to change her name. “He had a long list of exotic names that he chose from for his actresses,” she said in a 2013 interview. The newly christened Carla Balenda starred with Gig Young in (1950) and in , then worked with Elliott Reid in (1951), alongside Marie Windsor in (1952), opposite John Derek in (1953) and with Slim Pickens in (1954).
She went back to Bliss in 1957 and showed up on episodes of such series as , , , and before leaving acting in the 1960s, then was involved with a charity known as The Dolls. She was married to high school sweetheart John Martin from 1944 until their 1959 divorce and to William Rutter, a publisher of law study guides, from 1965 until his 2012 death. Survivors include her children, Paul, Joanna and Charles, and 13 grandchildren.
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