Martha O'Driscoll

In 1947 Arthur I.Appleton married Hollywood actress Martha O’Driscoll.

Born in 1922 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Martha O’Driscoll was the daughter of William and Freda Enlows O’Driscoll. When the family moved to Arizona she started dancing lessons and began appearing in local pageants and plays. Choreographer Hermes Pan spotted her in a production at the Phoenix Little Theatre and suggested to Freda that Martha would have a good chance in movies.

Taking him up on his suggestion, Freda and her children moved to Hollywood in 1935. They answered an advertisement for dancers and Martha was given a role, at age 13, in “Collegiate” (1935), a musical in which a playboy inherits a college. 

While under contract to Universal Pictures from 1937 to 1946, she was loaned out to major studios including Paramount Pictures, Radio Pictures Inc. and Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios to star in everything from Westerns to romantic comedies to horror flicks. She appeared as Daisy Mae in “Li'l Abner” (1940) — the first screen version of the famous comic strip — and proved a feminine foil. She played the pretty prairie flower to Western film stars including Tim Holt in “Wagon Train” (1942), and was terrorized by the Wolfman, Dracula and Frankenstein in her most notable feature, “House of Dracula” (1945).

When O'Driscoll married Arthur I. Appleton, she retired from her acting career. They moved to Northbrook, Illinois, and had four children: James, John, Linda and William.