Randy Stuart

Who was Randy Stuart?

Randy Stuart, born as Elizabeth Shaubell, was an American actress in film and television. A familiar face in several popular films of the 1940s and 1950s, and later in Western-themed television series, she is perhaps best remembered as Louise Carey, the wife of Scott Carey, played by Grant Williams, in The Incredible Shrinking Man, now considered an early classic of science-fiction film.

Stuart's parents were itinerant musicians in the American South and the Middle West. She was born in Iola in Allen County in southeastern Kansas, and made her stage debut at the age of three. The Shaubells relocated to California, where Stuart attended college. A screen test in the play The Women led to Stuart being placed under contract at 20th Century Fox. Her film debut was uncredited in the 1947 picture, The Foxes of Harrow.

In 1948, she played Peggy, a knowing secretary in the comedy Sitting Pretty. She also appeared that year in Apartment for Peggy with William Holden and Jeanne Crain.

In 1949, she portrayed Lieutenant Eloise Billings, an object of desire for Cary Grant, in the Howard Hawks film I Was a Male War Bride, also starring Ann Sheridan.