Cara Williams, a perky and talented blue-eyed redhead, was born Bernice Kamiat on June 29, 1925, in Brooklyn, to an Austrian Jewish father, Benjamin Kamiat, and a mother of Romanian Jewish descent, Flora (Schwartz).
As a child, she began performing and continued to do so into her teens. After her parents' divorce, she relocated with her mother to Hollywood, where she attended the Hollywood Professional School and lent her voice to both radio and animated cartoon shorts.
At the age of 16, she was signed by 20th Century-Fox and began playing minor roles in dramas, comedies, and musicals, billing herself as Bernice Kay.
Throughout World War II, she was known for adding a touch of pep and zing to her small roles, playing various characters such as secretaries, salesgirls, and girlfriends in films like Wide Open Town, Happy Land, In the Meantime, Darling, and Don Juan Quilligan.
In the post-war years, she made a splash on stage in a production of "Born Yesterday" and started earning feisty, tart-tongued roles in films like Boomerang! and The Saxon Charm.
By the 1950s, she showed scene-stealing potential in The Girl Next Door and The Helen Morgan Story, and earned an Academy Award nomination for her supporting turn in The Defiant Ones opposite Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis.
This led to a couple of flashy gangster moll roles in the film comedies Never Steal Anything Small and The Man from the Diners' Club.
She also starred in the sitcom December Bride and later in her own series, The Cara Williams Show, alongside Frank Aletter.
However, her career went into decline after the canceling of her sitcom, and she eventually retired in the 1980s.
In her personal life, she was married to actor John Drew Barrymore and had a son, John Blyth Barrymore, who also became an actor. She later married a Beverly Hills realtor and developed a strong business acumen in interior designing and as a champion poker player.
