With the growing popularity in recent decades of what is commonly referred to as film noir it is only natural that Audrey Totter would find a whole new appreciative audience. After all her credentials were impeccable and she was the ideal incarnation of the post-World War II bad girl. A radio actress, she was signed by M-G-M in 1944. In her feature debut, Main Street After Dark (1945), she already shows her proclivity toward fallen women. In the noir classic The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) she had a small part as a floozie. Then came her breakthrough role in Robert Montgomery’s subjective-camera thriller Lady in the Lake (1947).

In quick succession she appeared in the films that cemented her reputation as a tough dame, playing opposite Claude Rains in The Unsuspected (1947), Robert Taylor in The High Wall (1947), Ray Milland in Alias Nick Beal (1949), Robert Ryan in The Set-Up (1949), Richard Basehart in Tension (1949), and Richard Conte in Under the Gun (1951). All of them solid excursions into the realms of chiaroscuro netherworlds greatly enhanced by Totter’s presence.

She was also seen to advantage in Any Number Can Play (1949), FBI Girl (1951), The Sellout (1952), Assignment: Paris (1952),  My Pal Gus (1952), Woman They Almost Lynched (1953),  Man in the Dark (1953), A Bullet for Joey (1955), and Women’s Prison (1955). From the mid-1950s on the majority of her acting was done on TV, her last appearance being on an episode of Murder, She Wrote from 1987. Audrey Totter died December 12, 2013, in West Hills, California.  She was married to Leo Fred, assistant dean of the UCLA School of Medicine, from 1953 to his death in 1995; they had one child Mea Lang. Like her husband, upon Totter's death her body was donated to the UCLA Medical School for research.