John Carradine - Personal Life

Personal Life

Carradine was married four times. He married his first wife, Ardanelle McCool Cosner, in 1935. She was mother of Bruce and David. John adopted Bruce, Ardanelle's son from a previous marriage. John had planned a large family but, according to the autobiography of his son David, after Ardanelle had had a series of miscarriages, Carradine discovered that she had had repeated "coat hanger" abortions, without his knowledge, which rendered her unable to carry a baby to full term. After only three years of marriage, Ardenelle Carradine filed for divorce, but the couple remained married for another five years.

They divorced in 1944, when David was seven years old. Carradine left California to avoid court action in the alimony settlement. After the couple engaged in a series of court battles involving child custody and alimony, which at one point landed Carradine in jail, David joined his father in New York City. By this time his father had remarried. For the next few years David was shuffled between boarding schools, foster homes and reform school.

Carradine married Sonia Sorel, who had appeared with him in Bluebeard (1944) immediately following his divorce from Ardanelle in 1945. Sonia, who had adopted the stage name of Sorel, was the daughter of San Francisco brewer, Henry Henius, granddaughter of biochemist Max Henius, and a great-niece of the historian Johan Ludvig Heiberg. Together she and Carradine had three sons, Christopher, Keith and Robert. Their divorce in 1957 was followed by an acrimonious custody battle, which resulted in their sons being placed in a home for abused children as wards of the court. Keith Carradine said of the experience, "It was like being in jail. There were bars on the windows, and we were only allowed to see our parents through glass doors. It was very sad. We would stand there on either side of the glass door crying".

Eventually, Carradine won custody of the children. For the next eight years, Sonia was not permitted to see the children. Robert Carradine said that he was raised primarily by his stepmother, his father's third wife, Doris (Rich) Grimshaw, and believed her to be his mother until he was introduced to Sonia Sorel at a Christmas party when he was 14 years old. He told a journalist, "I said, 'How do you do.' Keith took me aside and said 'That's our real mother.' I didn't know what he was talking about. But he finally convinced me."

When John Carradine married Doris (Erving Rich) Grimshaw in 1957, she already had a son from a previous marriage, Dale, and a son from a later relationship, Michael, both of whom, along with Sonia Sorel's son, Michael Bowen, are sometimes counted among John Carradine's eight sons. She was a one-time studio typist who typed the script to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and who went on to play a few roles in film and television. Doris died in 1971 in a fire in her apartment in Oxnard, California. The fire was caused by a burning cigarette. She had been rescued from a similar fire just two weeks earlier. At the time of her death, she and Carradine were separated. Carradine was married a fourth time, from 1975 to 1988, to Emily Cisneros, who survived him.

Carradine suffered from painful and crippling arthritis during his later years, but continued working.