Susan Peters

Making her debut as an extra in Susan and God (1940), she initially struggled with bit parts, billed under her given name because she refused the studio's made-up stage name. She tested for a lead in Kings Row (1942) but lost to Betty Field. Her first big break came with The Big Shot (1942), where she was fourth-billed. Dropped by Warners, MGM picked up her contract and gave her the stage name Susan Peters. In Tish (1942) she met actor Richard Quine, who played her husband; they married in November 1943. She won the role of Ronald Colman's teenage stepdaughter in Random Harvest (1942), earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. She followed with Assignment in Brittany (1943), Young Ideas (1943), and Song of Russia (1944), where she played a young Soviet pianist. Along with Van Johnson, she was named a "Star of Tomorrow."

Tragedy struck on New Year's Day 1945, when a hunting rifle accidentally discharged during a duck-hunting trip, leaving her permanently paralyzed from the waist down. MGM paid her bills but eventually settled her contract. She adopted a son, Timothy Richard, with Quine in 1946, but they divorced two years later. She continued working on radio and made a film comeback in The Sign of the Ram (1948), playing a wheelchair-bound woman. She toured in The Glass Menagerie, performing from a wheelchair, and in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, entirely from a couch. In 1951 she starred in the TV series Miss Susan, which lasted less than one season. Plagued by kidney problems, pneumonia, and acute depression, she developed an eating disorder and died on October 23, 1952, at age 31, of kidney failure and starvation.