Osa Massen

[decodoll]

I've just found out that a cousin on my Gramma's side was 1940's movie star, Osa Massen! Only took my mom 33 years to give me this little tidbit of information! Anyway, I'm very excited! I have to rent You'll Never Get Rich again so that I can watch for her and Rocketship XM. She was in many movies during the mid-30's to 1950 with stars such as Joan Crawford, Fred Astaire, Rita Hayworth and Susan Hayward, and then did work in TV. Here are some pics of her I found online.

 

[Novella]

Wow - you have good reason to be excited! Reminds me that there's always something more out there to learn about family history and relations.

 

[Sefton]

say...isn't there a bit of a resemblance too?

 

[skinnychik]

They do look similar, don't they?

 

[decodoll]

Thank you. That is a very nice compliment!

 

[Feraud]

say...isn't there a bit of a resemblance too?

I was just about to type that too!
Isn't it great to find interesting things out about your family past?

 

[Andykev]

Biography

Biography for
Osa Massen

Birth name
Aase Madsen
Height
5' 4¬?" (1.64 m)
Mini biography

Osa Massen (born Aase Madsen) was a newspaper photographer with an ambition to become a film editor. Prolific Danish film director Alice O'Fredericks gave her a role in her film Kidnapped in 1935.

After only two films in Denmark she was given a screen test by 20th Century Fox and arrived in Hollywood in 1936.

As at 2004, Osa Madsen Vogel lives in a suburb of the Danish capital, Copenhagen.
IMDb mini-biography by
MW Copenhagen
Mini biography

Luck and timing can be everything in a career and in glamorous, sultry-eyed Osa Massen's case, it afforded her the opportunity of a brief but enjoyable 1940s film celebrity during WWII Hollywood. She was born Aase Madsen on January 13, 1915 (some sources indicate 1916) in Copenhagen, and received early training as a news photographer with special designs on becoming a film editor. It seems the aspiring young photographer was a natural for the other side of the lens as well for Swedish-born writer/director Alice O'Fredericks saw something in the teenager, who had no experience whatsoever, to cast her in a major role in her film. Osa was prominently featured in the Danish-made Kidnapped (1935/I), a family comedy which (obviously) had nothing to do with the Robert Louis Stevenson classic. After making a second Danish film, she was noticed by Hollywood scouts, who just happened to out hunting for alluring overseas imports, and practically handed a Twentieth Century-Fox contract. Luck and timing.

Encouraged by the success and near-mythological status that Greta Garbo was achieving, Hollywood was clamoring to find aloof foreign lovelies and turn them into stars. Osa was one of many brought over, which included Anna Sten, Signe Hasso, Sigrid Gurie, Gwili Andre, and, of course, Ingrid Bergman. All but the dazzling Bergman went on to eek out at least a decent "B" level career. Although Osa never became a top star, this semi-great Dane certainly had her share of chances. An occasional co-star, she more often than not took a back seat to the star. She made a promising American debut as part of a romantic triangle along with Fred MacMurray and Madeleine Carroll in the light comedy Honeymoon in Bali (1939) playing an exotic party girl. Down the line, however, she would make a more of an impact in an unsympathetic vein. One of her best was the taut melodrama A Woman's Face (1941), in which she played Melvyn Douglas's unfaithful wife who was being blackmailed by an embittered Joan Crawford. She and Crawford manage a great confrontational scene in which all claws are bared. By this time Warner Bros. Studios had taken over Osa's contract. She played a tempting foreign immigrant who breaks up George Montgomery's marriage in Accent on Love (1941) and another mistress with a motive in the Fred Astaire / Rita Hayworth musical confection You'll Never Get Rich (1941), this time hooking up with married Robert Benchley. In between the frothy dialog, Osa danced to the tune of "So Near and Yet So Far".

She more than fit the "shady lady" bill in the espionage tale The Devil Pays Off (1941), and in standard war themes such as Background to Danger (1943), Jack London (1943), The Master Race (1944) and Tokyo Rose (1946). She played sister to skating legend Sonja Henie in one of the star's popular hard-water musicals, and scored quite well with critics in the topnotch post-war film noir Deadline at Dawn (1946). At one point of her career her stage name was being confused with that of glamorous Hungarian actress Ilona Massey and/or American redhead Ona Munson (Belle Watling in Gone with the Wind (1939)). While making the picture Million Dollar Weekend (1948) Osa was goaded on by co-star Gene Raymond to change her name to the very American-sounding "Stefanie Paull." Not a great move. She wisely went back to "Osa Massen" in her very next picture Night Unto Night (1949). Moving into the 1950s, Rocketship X-M (1950), a pioneer sci-fi thriller, was one of her last pictures as she focused more and more on the new medium -- TV. Appearing on such series as "Wagon Train" and "Perry Mason," she returned to movie-making just one more time, playing a German frau in Outcasts of the City (1958).

As mysterious as the femme fatales she played, the lovely Osa made a Garbo-like exit from the limelight in 1962. Divorced in the early 1940s from minor actor Allan Hersholt, the son of noted character star and humanitarian Jean Hersholt, Osa was widowed a decade later by her second husband, a Beverly Hills physician. A third marriage to a Hollywood dentist also ended in divorce. She eventually went back to live in her homeland for a time, but again returned to the Los Angeles area and died on January 2, 2006, in Santa Monica. So obscure and forgotten was she that her death was not even reported in the Hollywood papers until well over a month later.

 

[BellyTank]

Congratulations!

I have a similar kind of family/movie star connection but it's with Olivia de Havilland.

B
T

 

[decodoll]

Thanks, Andykev. I was thinking I should have posted her biography too.

That is quite cool, BT!

 

[RetroModelSari]

I can see similarities in the cheeks, the mouth and the nose! How exiting to have relatives like that!

 

[artdecodame]

Oh, gosh, this is amazing! And I agree about the similarities looks-wise. Very lovely! Now I just have to see something with Osa.