Mary Sinclair

Mary Sinclair (November 15, 1922 – November 5, 2000) was an American television, film and stage actress and “a familiar face to television viewers in the 1950s” as a performer in numerous plays produced and broadcast live during the early days of television. Sinclair was also a painter and had in her youth been a Conover model. Her husband, for a time, was Broadway producer and director, George Abbott.

Early life and modeling

Sinclair was born Ella Delores Cook and raised in San Diego, California. As a young woman she began modeling in Los Angeles, and in 1944, she left Hollywood for Manhattan, where she modeled for the Conover agency and acted in summer stock. "I was the arty type," she recalled in a 1951 interview with The New York Times. "I wanted to go to New York and be a real actress.”

Acting career

In New York City, she became friends with theater producer Hal Prince and theater producer, playwright and director George Abbott, her senior by thirty-five years, whom she married in April 1946 and divorced in 1951. And in the 1940s, she began to acquire experience as a freelance television actress, appearing on 36 programs in two years. But it was CBS board chairman William S. Paley who singled Sinclair out, in 1951, by giving her a seven-year contract with CBS, one of the first acting contracts granted by the network.The New York Times reported that she was the first dramatic actress "to enter video's incubator for hatching its own stars."