Susan Cummings

Susan Cummings (born Gerda Susanne Tafel; July 10, 1930 – December 3, 2016) was a German-American actress active from the 1940s to 1960s who started as a teenager in the earliest days of commercial television and appeared in television shows, feature films and on Broadway. Her birth surname of Tafel was sometimes printed as Ta Fel. Early years Born Gerda Susanne Tafel in Bavaria, Germany, she immigrated to the United States at age 7 on March 12, 1938, shortly before the outbreak of World War II. The daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Eugene Tafel, she was raised in Newark, New Jersey, where her father ran a bakery. Career Cummings (billed as Suzanne Tafel) was a teenager when she became a regular on the American television variety series At Home, which aired on New York City station WCBW (now WCBS-TV) from 1944 to 1945 in the earliest years of commercial television. She first appeared in Broadway theatre in 1945, portraying Susan Peters in Carousel. During the 1958–59 season, Cummings portrayed Georgia, proprietress of the Golden Nugget Saloon, in the syndicated Western television series Union Pacific.