A few words on the breif career of B movie actress Sheila Terry (Kathleen “Kay” Mulhern, 1910-1957). The title of this post is to clarify a confusion that could only happen to the kind of people who read this blog: today’s subject is NOT the same woman was the former vaudeville partner of Benny Rubin and John Berkes. The most likely place you’re liable to have seen this Sheila Terry is in the Joe E. Brown comedies You Said a Mouthful (1932) and Son of a Sailor (1933).
Originally from small town Minnesota, Terry had studied to be a teacher to please an uncle so that she would remain in his will — which is very much like a mystery plot in one of her movies. In 1928, she married a Toronto socialite. The following year, their wealth was lost in the stock market crash; Terry seperated from her husband in 1930. She ended up studying acting at the Dickson Kerwin school, which was then affiliated with the Royal Academy in London. She appeared in some regional stock theatre for a few months. An appearance in a New York production of A Little Racketeer (1932) got her spotted by scouts, and thus she began her short movie career: 43 films over about six years.
As is pretty typical, Terry tended to play bit parts and walk-ons in major films, and larger ones (sometimes female leads) in B movies. She’s in many a pre-code classic whose titles tell their naughty stories: Weekend Marriage, Jewel Robbery, They Call it Sin, Lawyer Man, and The Match King, as well as crime dramas like I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and 20,000 Years in Sing-Sing (all in 1932!) There were also lots of poverty row westerns with stars like Buck Jones and John Wayne, things like Haunted Gold (1932), Rocky Rhodes (1934), and The Lawless Frontier (1934). She was the leading lady in William Boyd’s last non-Hopalong Cassidy film Go Get ‘Em Haines (1936).
In 1937, Terry married a second time and moved to San Francisco. It quickly proved a mistake. She divorced and tried to return to acting, but her career had already been in pretty bad shape by the time she left it…there was nothing to restart. She worked as a press agent for a number of years, but this line eventually evaporated, too. In 1957 Terry was found dead in her New York apartment, her life extinguished by an overdose of sleeping pills. She was buried on Hart Island, which is the location of New York’s Potter’s Field.
For more on the history of show business, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous.
(Travalanche) 
You must be logged in to post a comment.