Carla Balenda, who starred alongside Dana Andrews and Claude Rains in the RKO Pictures thriller Sealed Cargo and portrayed Mickey Rooney’s girlfriend on the NBC sitcom Hey Mulligan, has died. She was 98.
Balenda, billed at times as Sally Bliss, her birth name, died of natural causes at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, her grandson Jim Martin told The Hollywood Reporter.
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She also played a nurse on the 1955-56 syndicated series The Adventures of Dr. Fu Manchu, starring Glen Gordon, and recurred as Miss Hazlitt, Timmy’s (Jon Provost) teacher, on CBS’ Lassie from 1958-63.
In Sealed Cargo (1951), Balenda portrayed a woman who is aboard a fishing trawler bound for Newfoundland when she and the skipper (Andrews) wind up tangling in the North Atlantic with Nazis led by Rains’ character. She often said it was her favorite role.
When Rooney took his first crack at television, playing Mickey Mulligan — a clumsy page for a TV network who dreams of becoming a performer — on Hey Mulligan, she was his girlfriend, secretary Pat Harding. The 1954-55 series, created by Blake Edwards and Richard Quine and also known as The Mickey Rooney Show, lasted one season of 36 episodes.
The daughter of a high school science teacher, Bliss was born in Carthage, New York, on Nov. 22, 1925. She attended Baldwin High School on Long Island and acting school in Rhode Island and did summer stock.
She came to Hollywood at age 17 after signing with Columbia Pictures and appeared in such films as Swing in the Saddle (1944), Eadie Was a Lady (1945) and Rustlers of the Badlands (1945).
She got married and moved back to New York but returned to acting at RKO, where studio head Howard Hughes asked her to change her name. “He had a long list of exotic names that he chose from for his actresses,” she said in a 2013 interview.
The newly christened Carla Balenda starred with Gig Young in Hunt the Man Down (1950) and in Sealed Cargo, then worked with Elliott Reid in The Whip Hand (1951), alongside Marie Windsor in Outlaw Women (1952), opposite John Derek in Prince of Pirates (1953) and with Slim Pickens in Phantom Stallion (1954).
She went back to Bliss in 1957 and showed up on episodes of such series as The Gray Ghost, The Real McCoys, The Rebel, Perry Mason and Wagon Train before leaving acting in the 1960s, then was involved with a charity known as The Dolls.
She was married to high school sweetheart John Martin from 1944 until their 1959 divorce and to William Rutter, a publisher of law study guides, from 1965 until his 2012 death.
Survivors include her children, Paul, Joanna and Charles, and 13 grandchildren.