Gita Hall

Gita Hall (September 6, 1933 – August 13, 2016) was a Swedish-American model and actress who was the second wife of actor Barry Sullivan and a member of the "jet set" in the 1950s and 1960s.

Early years

Hall was born Birgitta Wetterhall in Linköping, Sweden. The daughter of a chemist, she spoke seven languages. She worked as a model to pay tuition for her studies at a dramatic school in Sweden.

She had minor roles in three Swedish movies in 1951-1952 and won the Miss Stockholm beauty pageant in 1953. Broadway columnist and radio personality Walter Winchell "discovered" her and got her into Hollywood movies. (An International News Service story published February 26, 1958, says that Hall "landed in the movies by way of producer Clarence Greene, whom she met at a party in New York.")

Film

Hall's American film debut came in Don Seigel's The Gun Runners, an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not. She appeared with Sullivan in the 1958 movie Wolf Larsen.

In 2013, Hall settled a lawsuit she filed against Lionsgate, the production company behind the TV series Mad Men for using an image of her gleaned from a 1960s Revlon ad in the show's opening title credits sequence. The image was taken from a Richard Avedon photograph; the producers had secured permission from Revlon, but not from Hall.

Personal life

Hall married Leslie Jackson in August 1954. After they divorced, she married Sullivan in 1958; they divorced in 1961. Hall was the mother of Sullivan's daughter Patricia. She later married Mitchell May III, an insurance broker. He died in 2000.

Death

Hall died of liver failure in Studio City, Los Angeles. She was survived by three daughters, nine grandchildren and one great-granddaughter.

Filmography

• The Gun Runners (1958) - Eva
• Wolf Larsen (1958) - Kristina