Virginia Christine had a long career as a character actress on the screen, but she will always be best remembered as the Swedish Mrs. Olsen, who somehow knew everything about making coffee, and somehow always found herself in the kitchen of some hapless young housewife who just could not seem to make good coffee. Mrs. Olsen taught these women how to do so, as long as it involved using "Mountain Grown" Folger's Coffee. For some reason only Mrs. Olsen knew, no other kind of coffee you could buy was any good. And if you believe that, I have some oceanfront property in Arizona I'd like to sell you... and if you'll buy that, I'll throw in the Brooklyn Bridge for practically nothing!
Virginia was born in the small town of Stanton, Iowa, which later converted its town water tower to resemble a coffee pot in honor of its most famous citizen. When her family moved to Los Angeles, California, Virginia worked in radio while attending the University of California, Los Angeles. She was trained for a theatrical career by director/actor Fritz Feld, whom she married in 1940. In 1942, she signed a contract with Warner Bros. and started appearing in various films. Her first film was Aufstand in Trollness (1943), in which she played a Norwegian peasant girl called Miss Olson. Over the years, she appeared in prestigious films such as Zwölf Uhr mittags (1952) and Das Urteil von Nürnberg (1961) - and in both horror films such as The Mummy's Curse (1944) and Billy the Kid gegen Dracula (1966) and science fiction films such as Die Dämonischen (1956). She was a favorite of director Stanley Kramer, appearing in a number of his films. But her greatest fame came in the 1960s when she started her 21-year stint as the matronly Mrs. Olsen, who always had comforting words for young married couples while pouring Folger's Coffee in their TV ads.
