Lynn Bari (December 18, 1913 – November 20, 1989), born Margaret Schuyler Fisher, was a movie actress who specialized in playing sultry, statuesque man-killers in roughly 150 20th Century Fox films from the early 1930s through the 1940s.

Biography

Bari was the only daughter of John Maynard Fisher, a native of Tennessee, and his wife, Marjorie Halpen of New York. She had a younger brother, John. Fisher died in 1920, and his widow moved the family to Lynchburg, Virginia. Here Bari's mother met and married the Reverend Robert Bizer, a Religious Science minister. Assigned a position with his church in Boston, Bizer moved the family to Massachusetts. Bari later recalled other children at school in Boston made life miserable for her and her brother making constant fun of their obvious Southern accents. She determined to eliminate hers, becoming involved with amateur theatrics and taking elocution lessons. Bari was enthusiastic when at the age of 13 she was told her stepfather had been reassigned to Los Angeles, where he later became the head of the Institute of Religious Science.

Her stage name, selected as 'Lynn Barrie' while at dramatic school at 14, is a composite of theater actress Lynn Fontanne and author J. M. Barrie's. After reading a story about the Italian city of Bari, she decided to change the spelling.

A staunch Republican, Bari actively supported conservative causes, campaigned for Republican presidential candidates from Hoover to Reagan and was a regular attendee of GOP national conventions.

Bari's promising career was sabotaged by unresolved problems with her domineering, alcoholic mother and three marriages.


Marriages and children
Bari was married to agent Walter Kane, producer Sid Luft and psychiatrist Dr. Nathan Rickles. Luft married Bari November 28, 1943. They divorced December 26, 1950. She and Rickles wed August 30, 1955; they divorced in 1972. Bari's first child, a daughter with Luft, was born August 7, 1945, in St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica, California, but died the next day. Two years later she had a son John Michael Luft (b. 1948). John Michael was the subject of "a bitter custody battle" between Luft and Bari. A judge in Los Angeles ruled in Bari's favor in November 1958, ruling that the Luft household "was an improper place in which to rear the boy.

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