Nina Shipman, a onetime 20th Century Fox contract player who starred opposite Fred MacMurray in The Oregon Trail and once filled in for Grandpa on a memorably wacky episode of The Munsters, has died at 88. She died Sunday of natural causes in a hospital in Gardena, California, her stepdaughter Lianne Bremer told The Hollywood Reporter.
Shipman's screen career began with a brief, uncredited turn in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), in which she played a woman mistaken for Kim Novak's character — whether Madeleine Elster or Judy Barton remains part of the film's puzzle. As a contract player at Fox, she appeared as a chorus girl alongside Bing Crosby, Robert Wagner and Stella Stevens in Frank Tashlin's Say One for Me (1959), and later played Crosby's daughter in Blake Edwards' High Time (1960), which followed his character, a wealthy 51-year-old restaurateur, back to college.
In The Oregon Trail (1959), she played Prudence Cooper, caught in a love triangle between MacMurray's newspaper reporter and wagon train leader William Bishop, who doubled as an agent for President James K. Polk. The film's cross-country journey was famously shot in just 12 days on the Fox lot in Century City.
Born in Los Angeles on Aug. 15, 1938, Shipman came from a show business lineage. Her father, Barry Shipman, wrote Westerns and Dick Tracy films in the 1930s and later wrote for TV's Lassie. Her mother, Gwynne Shipman, was a dancer and actress whose credits included Hopalong Cassidy Returns. Her grandmother, Nell Shipman, was a silent film actress, and her grandfather, Ernest Shipman, belonged to one of the first Shakespearean touring companies in the U.S.
She attended Maddox Academy in Mexico City and Eagle Rock High School in Los Angeles, graduated from UCLA with a music degree, studied under Sanford Meisner and performed at the Pasadena Playhouse. Early uncredited roles included The Hunters (1958), In Love and War (1958) and Compulsion (1959), and she played the daughter of Macdonald Carey and Marsha Hunt in Blue Denim (1959).
Shipman later worked mainly in television, including a 1966 episode of The Andy Griffith Show, "The County Clerk," in which she played nurse Irene Fairchild opposite Jack Dodson's Howard Sprague. Her other credits included Sugarfoot, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Surfside 6, Maverick, 77 Sunset Strip, Bonanza, Rawhide, Dr. Kildare, Daniel Boone, Perry Mason, Burke's Law, The Beverly Hillbillies, The Mod Squad, Adam-12, Highway to Heaven and General Hospital.
In 1960, she served as maid of honor at actress Jill St. John's wedding to Woolworth heir Lance Reventlow in San Francisco. She wrote a 1975 book, How to Become an Actor in Television Commercials, and hosted Contemporary Health Issues, a 1981 series of 30 half-hour episodes used for college credit that covered sexuality, drugs, birth control, cardiovascular disease and alcoholism. She was also an accomplished pianist, a practitioner of falconry, a professor at the University of Hawaii at Hilo and a mentor through a theater company on the Big Island.
Shipman was married to Richard Harrington from 1956 until their 1958 divorce, to actor and stuntman C. Ransom Walrod from 1961 until their 1973 divorce, and to choral conductor Donald Bremer from 1975 until his death in 2015. She is survived by her daughters, Westerly and Lani, and her grandchildren, Bryson, Serena, Cole, Charlie and Clover.
Photo: ABC Television, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
