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If you watched TV in the 1960s and ’70s, you’ll recall that viewers had a choice of which beloved character actress to listen to when it came to buying coffee. You could go with the Wicked Witch of the West herself, Margaret Hamilton, as Cora and opt for “good to the last drop” Maxwell House. Otherwise, you could try a cup of “mountain-grown” Folger’s, as pitched by everyone’s favorite snooping Swede, Mrs. Olson, played by Virginia Christine. These spots came at the tail end of a busy, nearly four-decade career in stage, film, radio, and television.
Born Virginia Christine Ricketts in the Southwestern Iowa town of Stanton in 1920, she was indeed of Swedish-American ancestry and the daughter of performers on the rural Chautauqua circuit. Following her father’s death and mother’s remarriage, Virginia attended high school in Iowa and studied piano with dreams of being a concert pianist. After the family’s move to Southern California, however, she enrolled at UCLA and eventually shifted her career goals to acting.
Christine could be heard performing in radio programs while she was studying in college. She also wound up marrying one of her mentors, actor Fritz Feld, in 1940. Already a featured player in movies, the German-American Feld usually played waiters, doctors, or minor authority figures and was best known for slapping his cupped hand over his mouth to make a trademark “pop” sound. While he was twice her age, the couple had a happy marriage and stayed together until Feld’s death in 1993.
It was while she was appearing in a 1942 L.A. stage production of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler that a Warner Bros. agent saw Christine and signed her to a contract. Her movie debut came the following year in a B-actioner, Truck Busters, and later she played a peasant in Nazi-occupied Norway in the Errol Flynn WWII drama Edge of Darkness. Her scenes in the Humphrey Bogart wartime thriller Action in the North Atlantic would up on the cutting room floor, and by 1944 Warners released her.
Winding up at Universal, Virginia appeared in the 1944 western The Old Texas Trail alongside Rod Cameron. That same year she donned a black wig to play the Ancient Egyptian princess Ananka–beloved of the mummy Kharis (Lon Chaney, Jr.) and revived in 20th-century Louisiana–in The Mummy’s Curse, the fifth entry in the studio’s horror series. After this initial foray into the horror genre, it was back to the Wild West for the Red Ryder entry Phantom of the Plains in 1945, followed by a women-in-prison drama, Girls in the Big House, where Christine meets an untimely end at the hands of a jealous fellow inmate.
Christine returned to Universal for the 1946 shocker House of Horrors, where her Lady of the Streets (Hey, that’s how she’s billed) runs afoul of the murderous Creeper (Rondo Hatton). Her best role with the studio, however, came that same year when she was cast as Lilly, the ex-lover of boxer Ole “The Swede” Anderson (Burt Lancaster) who winds up married to police detective Sam Lubinsky (Sam Levene), in Robert Siodmak’s The Killers. Based on an Ernest Hemingway short story, this film noir gem was remade in 1964, with Christine returning to play Miss Watson, a blind secretary. She also appeared in several ’40s and ’50s noir thrillers, among them The Gangster (1947), Women in the Night (1948), and Cover Up (1949).
An uncredited turn in Marlon Brando’s 1950 film debut, The Men, brought the actress to the attention of producer Stanley Kramer. He would use Virginia in several of his pictures: as a nun in ’50’s Cyrano de Bergerac; another unbilled role in the 1952 western classic High Noon; and in the 1955 medical melodrama Not as a Stranger, where she also coached lead actress Olivia de Havilland on her Swedish accent. Christine is a woman whose uncle falls victim to the title aliens before they take her over in the 1956 sci-fi favorite Invasion of the Body Snatchers. She also seen in the 1957 Disney Revolutionary War drama Johnny Tremain and in Elvis Presley’s 1960 frontier saga Flaming Star. A key role came when Kramer had her play American judge Spencer Tracy’s German housekeeper, who tries to explain to him how the German people fell under Hitler’s influence and ignored the atrocities going on around them, in 1961’s Oscar-winning Judgment at Nuremberg.
Christine and husband Feld both appeared in the 1964 western/comedy 4 for Texas alongside Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Anita Ekberg (their second film together after 1946’s The Wife of Monte Cristo). Virginia played the mother of preacher/author Norman Vincent Peale (Don Murray) in the ’64 biopic One Man’s Way, and in 1966 she tries to stop the schemes vampire lord John Carradine in the bizarre genre-crossing Billy the Kid vs. Dracula. 1967 saw her reunite with Stanley Kramer on his groundbreaking 1967 social drama Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? She plays the “sympathetic” art gallery manager who gets a sharp dressing-down from gallery owner Katharine Hepburn before she’s told to “get permanently lost.” Virginia’s final screen role was a small part in 1969’s anti-Vietnam War drama Hail, Hero!, which marked the film debut for star Michael Douglas.
Christine was even more prolific in her television résumé. Among the many shows she could be seen on were Dragnet, The Abbott and Costello Show, The Adventures of Superman, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Gunsmoke, Perry Mason, The Twilight Zone, The Fugitive, The F.B.I., Ironside, and Kojak (not to mention her 1979-83 voicework on Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo). And that’s not even mentioning the over 100 (!) commercials in which her Mrs. Olson character saved many a marriage by introducing wives to the great taste of Folger’s coffee. The actress became so connected with her pitchwoman persona that Virginia’s hometown of Stanton decorated its city water tower to resemble a giant coffee pot!
After retiring from performing, Christine and Feld lived in retirement in Brentwood, California, where she was appointed honorary mayor in the late 1980s. Following her husbands’ 1993 death, Virginia passed away three years later at the age of 76.