Tanis Chandler (born Tannis Anne Goldthwaite; August 29, 1924 – May 7, 2006) was a French-born American film actress. She is perhaps best known to today's audiences as the ingenue in low-budget features with

The Bowery Boys The Bowery Boys are fictional New York City characters, portrayed by a company of New York actors, who were the subject of 48 feature films released by Monogram Pictures and its successor Allied Artists Pictures Corporation from 1946 through 1 ...

and

Charlie Chan Charlie Chan is a fictional Honolulu Police Department, Honolulu police detective created by author Earl Derr Biggers for a series of mystery novels. Biggers loosely based Chan on Hawaiian detective Chang Apana. The benevolent and heroic Chan ...

, and for incidental roles in major

Warner Bros. Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. (WBEI), commonly known as Warner Bros. (WB), is an American filmed entertainment studio headquartered at the Warner Bros. Studios complex in Burbank, California and the main namesake subsidiary of Warner Bro ...

features.

Early years

Chandler was born in

Nantes Nantes (, ; ; or ; ) is a city in the Loire-Atlantique department of France on the Loire, from the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic coast. The city is the List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, sixth largest in France, with a pop ...

, France. Her father was musician Chandler Goldthwaite, who was billed as Rex Chandler for his performances of popular music. Her mother was Leon Lorfray De Rousier. Chandler was educated initially by private tutors in Paris and, after the family moved to the United States in 1936, at the

Westlake School for Girls Harvard-Westlake School is an independent, co-educational university preparatory day school in Los Angeles, California, with about 1,600 students in grades seven through twelve. The school has two campuses: the middle school campus in Holmby ...

in Los Angeles. After her father's illness interrupted his work on radio programs, she became a model to help with finances.

Acting

In 1940, Chandler acted in a production of ''Prison Without Bars'' at the Troupers theater. Her film debut came in ''Devotion'' (1943), and she appeared in '' Cinderella Jones'' (1946), ''George White's Scandals'' and ''Wanderer of the Wasteland.'' She also used her fluency in French and Spanish to dub parts for foreign versions of approximately 30 films. Chandler pulled off a hoax on film executives when she obtained a part in ''

The Desert Song ''The Desert Song'' is an operetta with music by Sigmund Romberg and book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, Otto Harbach and Frank Mandel. It was inspired by the 1925 uprising of the Riffs, a group of Berber fighters, against French colonia ...

'' (1943) by pretending to be a male, Robert Archer. A wire-service news story distributed nationwide explained, "She was aided in the deception by the fact that she and most of the other players were clad in flowing robes and burnooses ..." Her success was such that the casting office sent Archer for work in another 1944 film, ''

My Reputation ''My Reputation'' is a 1946 American romantic drama film directed by Curtis Bernhardt. Barbara Stanwyck portrays an upper-class widow whose romance with an army officer causes trouble for her gossiping friends, domineering mother and young sons. ...

'' (released 1946). That venture ended, however, when a scene called for being shirtless while mowing a lawn. At that point, Chandler admitted to being a female, ending her male-impersonation efforts. Her explanation for the hoax was that studio executives frequently complained about a lack of men, and she hoped for a better opportunity for roles in films. In 1945

RKO Radio Pictures RKO Radio Pictures Inc., commonly known as RKO Pictures or simply RKO, is an American film production and distribution company, historically one of the "Big Five" film studios of Hollywood's Golden Age. The business was formed after the Kei ...

signed her for one year; she worked mostly in budget features for staff producer

Herman Schlom Herman Schlom (1904–1983) was a film producer who first received film credit as an assistant director for ''Dracula'' in 1931. He worked primarily for Republic Pictures, then RKO Radio Pictures. Some of Schlom's notable films, as a producer, i ...

, and generally appeared as hostesses, waitresses, and showgirls. Described as an "up-and-coming Hollywood starlet", Chandler was featured on the cover of ''

Parade A parade is a procession of people, usually organized along a street, often in costume, and often accompanied by marching bands, floats, or sometimes large balloons. Parades are held for a wide range of reasons, but are usually some variety ...

'' magazine's April 7, 1946, issue. She then signed with

Monogram Pictures Monogram Pictures Corporation was an American film studio that produced mostly low-budget films between 1931 and 1953, when the firm completed a transition to the name Allied Artists Pictures Corporation. Monogram was among the smaller studios i ...

for more prominent roles in "B" features, in which she sometimes spoke with a French accent. Her highest-profile film is probably the 1946

feature ''

The Big Sleep ''The Big Sleep'' (1939) is a hardboiled crime novel by American-British writer Raymond Chandler, the first to feature the detective Philip Marlowe. It has been adapted for film twice, in 1946 and again in 1978. The story is set in Los A ...

''.

Personal life

Tanis Chandler journeyed to France is 1949, where she was hired by a production crew making the multi-part feature '' Return to Life''; she played a British army captain. In October 1949, Chandler married Paul Mills. Chandler worked for a stock brokerage firm for a year, and she and her mother operated a kindergarten in which she taught when she was not working in films. She returned to Monogram for one more assignment in 1951, and to RKO for her final film, released in 1952. She died in May 2006 at the age of 81.

Filmography

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Chandler, Tanis 1924 births 2006 deaths 20th-century American actresses American film actresses French emigrants to the United States 21st-century American women