Signed by Warner Bros. on her 18th birthday, Parker’s career started with typical studio apprenticeship work. Her actual film debut was supposed to be a bit part in the Raoul Walsh classic They Died with Their Boots On (1941), but her scenes were left on the cutting room floor. The studio kept her busy in B-movies and shorts (Busses Roar, The Mysterious Doctor). Her first taste of a major production came with Michael Curtiz’s pro-Soviet wartime drama Mission to Moscow (1943), where she played the daughter of the U.S. ambassador.
By 1944, her distinct combination of classic, elegant beauty and deep emotional intelligence moved her out of the B-unit permanently. She gave a haunting performance opposite Paul Henreid in Between Two Worlds (1944), the fantasy drama about a group of passengers on a ship traveling between life and death. A massive breakthrough for Parker in Pride of the Marines (1945). She played the devoted, resilient girlfriend of a blinded WWII veteran (played by John Garfield). Her performance required a delicate balance of heavy drama and warmth, solidifying her reputation as an actress of real substance rather than just a glamorous face.
The late 1940s proved that Parker refused to be typecast, seamlessly shifting between melodrama, classic literature, and comedy. She took a massive risk by stepping into the role of the cruel, manipulative Mildred Rogers, a part Bette Davis had famously made her own a decade prior, in Of Human Bondage (1946). While it didn’t match Davis’s iconic heights, it proved Parker’s fearlessness in playing unlikable, complex characters.
Shifting gears into sparkling romantic comedy The Voice of the Turtle (1947, she starred opposite Ronald Reagan. Taking over a role made famous on Broadway by Margaret Sullavan, Parker was highly praised for her charming, slightly eccentric, and naive portrayal of an aspiring actress. In the gothic mystery The Woman in White (1948), she took on a challenging dual role as the frail, terrified Laura Fairlie and the mysterious, ghostly “woman in white.” She easily held her own against notorious scene-stealers like Sydney Greenstreet and Agnes Moorehead.
While the 1940s established her as a stellar studio asset, it was her very first role filmed at the tail-end of the decade that transformed her into a Hollywood powerhouse: Caged (1950). Her staggering performance as an innocent girl transformed into a hardened criminal in a brutal women’s prison earned her her first Academy Award nomination and won her the Best Actress Volpi Cup at the Venice Film Festival.
