Hillary Brooke

Hillary Brooke (born Beatrice Sofia Mathilda Peterson; September 8, 1914 – May 25, 1999) was an American film actress. Career A 5′6″ blonde from the Astoria neighborhood of New York City's borough of Queens, Brooke, who was of Swedish ancestry, started work as a model while attending Columbia University. She spent a year in the United Kingdom, mastering an RP accent that she used in several of her films. She frequently played English women in Hollywood films, and also had such a role in her only British-made film, The House Across the Lake. Brooke began her acting career in movies, where she changed her name to Hillary Brooke because, as she put it, she thought her own name was “so long and so heavy". She co-starred in three Sherlock Holmes films with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942), Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (1943) and The Woman in Green (1945). She was a regular on several television series of the early 1950s, playing Roberta Townsend, the glamorous love interest of Margie's father Vern Albright on the 1952–1955 TV series My Little Margie. On The Abbott and Costello Show, produced in the early 1950s and syndicated for many years afterward, Brooke played the role of a straitlaced, classy tenant of the rooming house where the two main characters lived. She was treated with reverence by the duo and was not a target of pranks and slapstick. The love interest of Lou Costello, she always addressed him as "Louis". As with the other main characters, her character's name was her real name. She also appeared in Africa Screams (1949) and Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd (1952) with the comedy team.