Lenore Aubert

Who was Lenore Aubert?

Lenore Aubert was a model and Hollywood actress best known for her movie roles as exotic, mysterious women.

She was born Eleanore Maria Leisner in what is now Celje, Slovenia, but at the time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She grew up in Vienna. She was married to Julius Altman, who was Jewish, and the couple fled Austria after the Anschluss to escape Nazi persecution. They moved to the United States after spending time in Paris.

In New York, she found work as a model and was eventually offered a lucrative stage role as Lorraine Sheldon in The Man Who Came to Dinner at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego. She began her U.S. film career in the early 1940s, taking the French-sounding screen name Lenore Aubert.

Her European accent limited her choice of roles, and she played such parts as a Nazi spy and a French war bride. She was most fond of her role in the 1947 film I Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now, playing glamorous entertainer Fritzi Barrington. Her best-known role was as Dr. Sandra Mornay, a beautiful but sinister scientist, in the 1948 horror-comedy Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

Her film career was basically over by the end of the 1940s.