Margia Dean had more than her fair share of near-misses in her film career. Frank Orsatti, her agent, recommended her to Louis B Mayer as the new Joan Crawford, only for her appointment to meet the MGM boss to be cancelled when Orsatti had a heart attack.
Alfred Hitchcock wanted her to act alongside Ingrid Bergman in his 1946 thriller Notorious but she had to turn him down because she was contracted to appear in a stage show and the producers refused to release her. Before that, she had been a runner-up in the 1939 Miss America beauty contest but might have won had she not made the serious misjudgment of reciting a passage from Shakespeare for her “turn”. “I was told singing would have
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