Anya Taranda
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Anya Taranda (January 1, 1915 – March 9, 1970) was an American model, showgirl, actress and wife of renowned songwriter Harold Arlen.
Born in New York City to Catholic Russian parents, the beautiful Anya Taranda became a Powers Agency model where she was signed as one of the original Breck Shampoo models. In 1932, she met composer Harold Arlen in New York City during the Broadway theatre production of Earl Carroll's Vanities. They eventually married on January 6, 1937 over the objection of both of their parents, because she was Gentile and he Jewish, but it turned out to be a lifelong love affair of inseparable devotion.
In 1934 she appeared in her first of nine film roles in an uncredited part of an "Earl Carroll girl" in Murder at the Vanities, based on Carroll's Broadway play.
In 1951 she was institutionalized in a sanatorium for seven years after repeatedly threatening her husband and others with physical harm.
Anya Taranda-Arlen died from a brain tumor in 1970. She is interred next to her husband in the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York.
