Career
Foch's movie career came during the height of the 1940s, when she played cool, aloof, and oftentimes foreign women of sophistication. She would ultimately be featured in over 80 films and hundreds of television shows. The actress was a regular in John Houseman's CBS Playhouse 90 television series. In 1951, she appeared with Gene Kelly in the musical An American in Paris, which was awarded the Best Picture Oscar. Foch appeared in Scaramouche (1952) as Marie Antoinette, and in Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956) as Bithia, Pharaoh's sister who finds the baby Moses in the bullrushes, adopts him as her son, and joins him and the Hebrews in their Exodus from Egypt.
Foch received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in the boardroom drama Executive Suite (1954), starring William Holden. In Spartacus (1960), starring Kirk Douglas and Laurence Olivier, she played a woman who chooses gladiators to fight to the death in the ring, simply for her entertainment. In 1963, she appeared as herself in the National Broadcasting Company game show Your First Impression. In 1964, she played the title role of the episode "Maggie, Queen of the Jungle" of Craig Stevens's CBS drama Mr. Broadway.
She was cast as Eva Frazier in the Outer Limits episode "The Borderland". She appeared in an episode of Gunsmoke as the widowed matriarch of a lawless town. She was also cast as the first murder victim of the Columbo mystery series starring Peter Falk, appearing in the pilot movie, Prescription: Murder (1968), with Gene Barry as her husband, a homicidal psychiatrist. In the early 1970s, she guest starred on NBC's The Brian Keith Show. In 1975, she appeared in the film Mahogany starring Diana Ross.
Later in her career, Foch appeared in War and Remembrance (1988) as the seemingly-nice librarian who soon advises Jane Seymour's character that the best place for her and her uncle would be the un-aptly named "Paradise Ghetto". She also appeared as 'Frannie Halcyon' in the TV miniseries Tales of the City (1993). Another notable TV role was as the Overseer Commander (or "Kleezantzun") in the first of the Alien Nation TV movies, Alien Nation: Dark Horizon (1994).
In her final years, she appeared on the television series Just Shoot Me, Bull, and NCIS, the latter portraying Dr. Donald "Ducky" Mallard's elderly mother.
Foch taught "Directing the Actor" classes at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, classes she had taught since the 1960s up to her death. She also worked as an independent script-breakdown consultant for many prominent Hollywood directors.
Read more about this topic: Nina Foch
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“The 19-year-old Diana ... decided to make her career that of wife. Today that can be a very, very iffy line of work.... And what sometimes happens to the women who pursue it is the best argument imaginable for teaching girls that they should always be able to take care of themselves.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“Work-family conflicts—the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child—would not be forced upon women with such sanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)