BORN ON THIS DAY: ANN SAVAGE

The beautiful Ann Savage was born on this day (February 19th) in 1921. Ann Savage was born in Columbia, South Carolina. During her early years, her family moved often as her father, an officer in the United States Army, relocated from base to base.After he died when Berniece was four years old, her mother moved the two of them to Los Angeles. Growing up around the corner from the Jewelry District, the Broadway movie palaces of downtown Los Angeles served as her babysitter while her mother worked selling jewelry.

She attended 64th Street Grammar School and Mount Vernon Junior High and first stepped on a sound stage at the age of 17 at MGM Studios and was screen tested by Edgar Selwyn. Ann spent time among the more famous Hollywood kids of the day, such as Lana Turner, Judy Garland, Freddie Bartholomew, and Deanna Durbin. Her MGM test did not work out, prompting her to get her teeth capped and acquire theatre training at the Max Reinhardt workshop on Sunset Boulevard. Reinhardt oversaw her name change, and Berniece became Ann Savage. The Reinhardt school's manager, Bert D'Armand, became Savage's agent, and the two later married. Savage was offered a screen test by Fox, but she decided not to turn up, as she knew the studio already had a bevy of pretty blondes.

Savage instead made a screen test with Columbia Pictures—after playing Lorna in a Reinhardt acting showcase of Odet's Golden Boy"—and was offered a contract. Recalling Columbia mogul Harry Cohn as "a friendly Uncle type", Savage remembered Cohn being intimidated by acid-tongued Rosalind Russell. The two actresses featured together in What a Woman!, one of a dozen films with Savage released in 1943.

Although Columbia typically groomed its girls in the mold of Rita Hayworth, Savage's look echoed Ann Sheridan, although her customary blonde locks were reddened for Footlight Glamour (1943) "so that the star, Penny Singleton, would be the only blonde on screen." She joined Joan Davis and Jinx Falkenburg in Two Senoritas from Chicago (1943) and starred (as a brunette) in the first of several outings with Tom Neal in Klondike Kate (1943). At this time, during World War II, Savage was also a popular pin-up model, including posing for a centerfold in Esquire shot by George Hurrell. 

Although Savage and Neal did not see eye-to-eye (she found him "childlike"), the duo would star together in Two Man Submarine and The Unwritten Code (both 1944) before their most famous film, the 1945 film noir Detour. Reminiscing in the 1980s about her career as a stalwart actress in B movies, Savage dismissed most of her roles as "mindless", saying: "The actresses were just scenery. The stories all revolved around the male actors; they really had the choice roles. All the actresses had to do was to look lovely, since the dialogue was ridiculous". Detour, she felt, was different. The two leads underwent role reversal, with Savage's Vera blackmailing Neal's Al, in a style described by her manager Kent Adamson as "vicious and predatory... very sexually aggressive".

When Detour entered the public domain, it frequently was syndicated on television channels and released in numerous VHS incarnations. Gaining cult status and garnering critical acclaim as "arguably film noir's greatest low-budget feature", this exposure earned Savage a new, younger following. From the 1980s, Savage also attended a number of film festivals, helping to bolster her personal status and leading her to emerge once more as "a glamorous figure-about-Hollywood at film festivals and galas".

The rest as they say is history...