Susan Cummings (actress)
Susan Cummings (born Gerda Susanne Tafel; July 10, 1930 – December 3, 2016) was a German-American actress active from the 1940s to 1960s who started as a teenager in the earliest days of commercial television and appeared in television shows, feature films and on Broadway. Her birth surname of Tafel was sometimes printed as Ta Fel.

Early years 
Born Gerda Susanne Tafel in Bavaria, Germany, she immigrated to the United States at age 7 on March 12, 1938, shortly before the outbreak of World War II. The daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Eugene Tafel, she was raised in Newark, New Jersey, where her father ran a bakery.

Career 
Cummings (billed as Suzanne Tafel) was a teenager when she became a regular on the American television variety series At Home, which aired on New York City station WCBW (now WCBS-TV) from 1944 to 1945 in the earliest years of commercial television. She first appeared in Broadway theatre in 1945, portraying Susan Peters in Carousel.

During the 1958–59 season, Cummings portrayed Georgia, proprietress of the Golden Nugget Saloon, in the syndicated Western television series Union Pacific.

She made two guest appearances on Perry Mason: one as Lois Fenton in the title role in the 1957 episode "The Case of the Fan Dancer's Horse" and as Margaret Swaine in the 1959 episode "The Case of the Lame Canary".

In 1960, she appeared as Stella Carney, a love interest of Marshall Dillon, in an episode of the television Western series Gunsmoke. She appeared as Patty in a 1962 episode of The Twilight Zone titled "To Serve Man". In February 1964, she appeared in an episode of the TV series McHale's Navy.

Personal life
In the late 1940s, Cummings was married to rodeo performer Wayne Dunafon. She married actor Keith Larsen on December 28, 1953 in Ensenada, Mexico. She was also married to actor Charles T. Pawley and accountant Robert E. Strasser.

According to Cummings, she was a registered Republican and was raised Lutheran but converted to Mormonism upon her marriage to Larsen.

Cummings died on December 3, 2016.

Filmography

References

External links

 

1930 births
2016 deaths
American film actresses
American television actresses
American stage actresses
Emigrants from Nazi Germany to the United States
German film actresses
German television actresses
German stage actresses
American Latter Day Saints
Converts to Mormonism
Former Lutherans
20th-century American actresses
20th-century German actresses
Arizona Republicans
California Republicans
21st-century American women