Ona Munson (born Owena Elizabeth Wolcott; June 16, 1903 – February 11, 1955)[1] was an American film and stage actress.

Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, Munson began her stage career in New York theater in 1919, debuting on Broadway in George White's Scandals.

Munson resumed her film career in the late 1930s, and was cast as madam Belle Watling in David O. Selznick's Gone with the Wind (1939), a role which became her most famous.

She starred in numerous films for Warner Bros. in the 1940s, but was often typecast based on her performance in Gone with the Wind, for instance in von Sternberg’s The Shanghai Gesture (1941).

Munson married painter Eugene Berman in 1950, her second husband after a five-year marriage to director Edward Buzzell.

In February 1955, Berman found Munson dead in their Manhattan apartment, having committed suicide via a barbiturate overdose.

After completing these films, Munson returned to New York and resumed her theater career, starring in Broadway productions of Hold Your Horses (1933), followed by Petticoat Fever and Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts (both staged in 1935), in the latter of which she portrayed Regina Engstrand.

[6] During rehearsals for Ghosts, Munson had a short-lived romantic affair with actress Alla Nazimova, which ended before the play's premiere.

"[8] Munson returned to Los Angeles in 1938 to appear a minor part in His Exciting Night, followed by an uncredited role in Dramatic School.

[14] Their affair was intense, with Munson once writing to Acosta in a letter: "I long to hold you in my arms and pour my love into you.

[14] Plagued by ill health stemming from an unnamed surgical procedure,[14] Munson committed suicide at the age of 51 with an overdose of barbiturates in her apartment in The Belnord on Manhattan's Upper West Side.