In 1938, a year before the outbreak of war, Palmer emigrated with her parents to the United States. '' (1944) She moved into film, helping to meet Hollywood's demand for exotic foreign women for war films and films noir. Her debut was playing
Catherine de' Medici in the 1942 short
Nostradamus and the Queen. Her feature film debut was in
Mission to Moscow (1943). She continued in 1944 with
Days of Glory, opposite
Gregory Peck, and later that year,
Lady on a Train. In the 1950s, her film career declined and she went into radio, television and commercials. She even started her own production company, called
Maria Palmer Enterprises. In the early 1960s, Palmer hosted her own Los Angeles show, entitled "Sincerely, Maria Palmer". She appeared as Nora Krasner in the 1963 Perry Mason episode "The Case of Lawful Lazarus" and as murderer Florence Wood in the 1962 episode "The Case of the Borrowed Baby". In her later years, Palmer wrote a number of unproduced television screenplays, often using the pseudonym
Eliot Parker White. In 1962, she played "Elsa" in the episode "The Immigrants" on CBS's
Rawhide and Marushka Vesterhauzy on the episode "A Bird of Warning" on NBC's
Sam Benedict. Her papers, covering the years 1922–1975, are held by the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. ==Personal life==