Maris Wrixon, a stunning starlet, had a fleeting career at Warner Brothers during the 1930s and 1940s, possessing the physical attributes that propelled other screen sirens to stardom. Noted Hollywood glamour photographer George Hurrell Sr. found her alluring, and her face adorned the covers of Vogue and the rotogravure section of numerous women's magazines. Despite this, Maris Wrixon never quite reached stardom and is now almost forgotten.
Before entering films in 1939, Maris had a smattering of a theatrical background. Warner Brothers put her in thirteen films that year and then in twelve during 1940. For the majority of these, she was relegated to uncredited background characters or had a line or two. Sometimes, she was a brunette, and at other times, a blonde. Maris eventually moved up the list of credits to undemanding leads in films like The Case of the Black Parrot (1941) and Bullets for O'Hara (1941).
In between these assignments, Maris was loaned out to Monogram, which she likened to being in a foxhole. Her best-remembered role at the Poverty Row outfit was in The Ape (1940),a lesser entry into the horror genre. Maris co-starred as a crippled girl whose condition moves an obsessive country doctor (Boris Karloff) to find a serum to cure her by any means, even murder.
In later years, Maris fondly recalled Karloff regaling her with amusing stories in between takes. Sadly, that was pretty much the high point of her career, though she popped up in a similar offering from Monogram, menaced this time by John Carradine (as another mad doctor) and his voodoo-practising maid in The Face of Marble (1946). She also appeared in a trio of routine wartime propaganda films of negligible artistic merit: Women in Bondage (1943),Waterfront (1944),and The Master Key (1945). None of these were enough to establish her as a star.
Maris made her last film in 1951, then had a few small TV guest spots before retiring from the screen in 1963. Unlike her desultory movie career, her personal life seems to have been rather more of a success story: she was married for 59 years to the German-born editor Rudi Fehr, surely an impressive feat for Hollywood.
