| Toqa Hesham |
A Canadian-American actress, born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, as Katherine Paula Lester. She married actor Anthony Quinn (1937-1965) and they had five children before their divorce. Among the most important works of DeMille are The Crusades (1935), Unconquered (1947), Black Gold (1947), and The Judge (1949). Katherine DeMille had a wonderful presence in the thirties and forties. She was born in Canada to a Scottish father who worked as a school teacher and an Italian-Swiss mother. Her father was killed in France during World War I, and her sick mother traveled with her to California, searching for her father’s relatives, but she died before they were found. Katherine, eight years old, was found in an orphanage in Los Angeles, run by Miss Constance, the wife of Cecil B. DeMille, and they adopted her. She studied at the Hollywood Girls School and the Santa Barbara Girls School. She loved acting in school plays, studied sculpture and piano, and found additional work in the theater under the name Kay Marsh. She started in cinema as an extra in films. Cecil DeMille realized his adopted daughter's dream of stardom, so he assigned her to supervise the script for his film Four Frightened People (1934) and allowed her to gain experience from his works. Katherine secretly applied for auditions and critics were impressed by her performance and beauty. She later contracted with Paramount Pictures, making several movies. She fell in love with the Mexican actor Anthony Quinn. After the death of her first son in a drowning accident in 1941, she gave up her career to take care of her children. She returned with the film Black Gold (1947), which was the only film in which she co-starred with her husband, Anthony Quinn. She then made the film The Judge (1949) and stopped completely, devoting herself to taking care of her home and children. She separated from her husband in 1965, and when she was afflicted with Alzheimer’s, she lived with one of her daughters in Tucson, Arizona, on April 27, 1995.
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