Corinne Griffith was an actress, author and activist who made her final fortune in real estate.
The woman who starred in "The Garden of Eden" and "Lilies of the Field" also wrote books as diverse as "My Life With the Redskins" on football and "Eggs I Have Known" on cooking.
The blue-eyed brunet was tagged "The Orchid of the Screen" in her early movie career because of her beauty. She won her first film role after winning a beauty contest in Santa Monica, where her widowed mother took her to sell family property. The contest judge was First National (later Warner Bros.) director George Fitzmaurice.
She made her last film, "Paradise Alley," in 1958.
A lady of means, she began campaigning in 1953 for abolition of the income tax, giving more than 480 speeches across the country, and in 1962 writing a book, "Taxation With Representation or Your Tax Money Went That Away." She created a national organization called Abolish Individual Federal Income Taxes.
An outspoken woman given to writing letters to the editor and comments to the sports columnist with an equally sharp pen, Griffith, whose third husband was longtime Redskins owner George Marshall, spoke lightly of her shadow career as "Mrs. Redskin."
"You have to learn to keep in the background and speak when spoken to. Women just aren't necessary to the running of a team," she told an interviewer in 1952.
Griffith later said she divorced Marshall after 22 years of marriage because he loved football more than her.
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