Brenda wanted to be a film actress, all right; it's just that she didn't want to be Brenda Marshall. Throughout her years in Hollywood, she insisted that her friends and coworkers address her not by her studio-fabricated cognomen, but by her given name of Ardis Ankerson (with the addition of the surname of her first husband, Gaines). A Warner Bros. contractee of the early 1940s, Ankerson/Marshall did her best work opposite Errol Flynn in L'aigle des mers (1940) and Des pas dans la nuit (1941). From 1941 through 1973, Brenda Marshall was married to actor William Holden, a curious union that evidently soured early on (Holden's friends blamed Marshall, and vice versa), and was distinguished by extended separations and numerous extracurricular romances.
