A tall, slender, highly attractive blonde, Canadian-born leading lady Rosemary Forsyth was born in Montreal. In the mid 1960s, she was groomed by Universal after a stretch as a model and a sprinkling of small time TV parts. The soft, demure beauty showed quite a bit of promise amid the rugged surroundings as the young ingénue or romantic co-star to a number of top male veterans. James Stewart in Shenandoah (1965), Charlton Heston in The War Lord (1965), and both Dean Martin and Alain Delon in Texas Across the River (1966) all utilized her services in their respective film. Married to actor Michael Tolan at the time, she suddenly took a leave of absence from filming to have a child. While the occasion, of course, was a joyous and fulfilling one, it managed to put a permanent damper on her career. She returned to filming with the so-so film Where It’s At (1969) starring Robert Drivas and the very mediocre Dick Van Dyke comedy vehicle Some Kind of a Nut (1969), never again reaching the peak prior to her maternity time off.
Rosemary showed up regularly on the small screen, however, in a slew of standard 70s TV-movies and episodic guest roles. On daytime, she took over the role of Laura Horton on Days of Our Lives (1965) from 1976-1980 and also had regular, albeit brief, parts on Santa Barbara (1984) and General Hospital (1963). In recent years, she has popped up as more arch matrons on such popular shows as Monk (2002), NYPD Blue (1993), and Without a Trace (2002). Divorced from Tolan, she later married again.
