1. Muriel Myee Steinbeck was an Australian actress who worked extensively in radio, theatre, television and film.
24 Facts About Muriel Steinbeck
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Muriel Steinbeck is best known for her film performance portraying the wife of aviator Sir Charles Kingsford Smith in Smithy and for playing the lead role in Autumn Affair, Australia's first television soap opera.
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Muriel Steinbeck's beauty meant that her photo often appeared in trade publications and she was particularly popular on radio soaps and at the Minerva Theatre in Sydney.
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Muriel Steinbeck was born the youngest of four children of William Martin Muriel Steinbeck and Lily Clarissa, in Broken Hill, New South Wales, where her father was working as a headmaster.
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Muriel Steinbeck's family left Broken Hill when Muriel was five.
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Muriel Steinbeck was educated at Newcastle and Sydney Girls High, where taking an interest in acting she often appeared in school plays.
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Muriel Steinbeck was appearing in a production of Where the Crash Comes when she was spotted by Lawrence H Cecil of the ABC.
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Muriel Steinbeck hired her to do radio drama and her career was launched.
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Muriel Steinbeck was later briefly under contract to James Raglan while he was producing at Colombia where she starred in Soldier of Fortune.
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Muriel Steinbeck began appearing on the stage regularly at the Minerva Theatre in Kings Cross.
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Muriel Steinbeck was in such productions as Spring Tide, Claudia, Watch on the Rhine, Janie, and The Amazing Dr Clitterhouse.
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Muriel Steinbeck made her feature film debut in A Son Is Born, a melodrama where she played the lead role, a woman who marries unhappily, and has an ungrateful son.
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Muriel Steinbeck has beauty and charisma and holds her own against three men who would all become major names.
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The film was a big commercial success but Australia made so few films at the time Muriel Steinbeck focused on radio and theatre work.
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Muriel Steinbeck had a role in the horse-racing melodrama Into the Straight in 1949 and another biopic Wherever She Goes in 1951.
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Muriel Steinbeck was in the film Long John Silver in 1954 and the TV serial The Adventures of Long John Silver in 1954, playing the wife of the governor.
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Muriel Steinbeck appeared in numerous radio serials in the 1950s including Blue Hills, Portia Faces Life and Gabrielle.
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Muriel Steinbeck starred in Australia's first TV soap opera, Autumn Affair.
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Muriel Steinbeck was in two one-off TV dramas, Reflections in Dark Glasses and Thunder on Sycamore Street and had a recurring role in a serial, Stormy Petrel.
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Muriel Steinbeck was in Heartbreak House at the Old Tote.
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Muriel Steinbeck was married to her first husband, a journalist, from 7 July 1934 until their divorce in 1949.
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Muriel Steinbeck then married company manager and engineer Brian Dudley Nicholson in 1951.
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Muriel Steinbeck lost a brother and a cousin during World War II; her brother was a POW and died in 1945, while her cousin was reported dead in 1944.
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Muriel Steinbeck died of cancer on 20 July 1982, aged 68.