Marjorie Riordan was "discovered" in Wisconsin in the early 1940s and became a studio contract player at Warner Brothers. During the 1950s she and another Warner Brothers player, Joyce Reynolds, decided that they found acting intellectually unsatisfying and the two of them returned to graduate school to study speech pathology.
Riordan's focus in graduate school was the psycho-dynamics of stuttering which led her, in turn, to study clinical psychology. Throughout the late fifties and first couple of years of the sixties, she pursued both her careers as a clinical psychologist and as an actress, but then gave up acting altogether.
While in graduate school, she met her husband Allan Schlaff, who was also a clinical psychologist. The two had a son, John Schlaff, who was born in 1959.
Riordan succumbed to breast cancer in 1984.
