DeHaven was born in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of actor-director Carter DeHaven and actress, Flora Parker DeHaven, both former vaudeville performers. A 1983 newspaper article reported, “Miss DeHaven … says that her real family name was O’Callahan before her father legally changed his name to DeHaven.”
She began her career as a child actor with a bit part in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). She was signed to a contract with MGM. Despite featured roles in such films as Best Foot Forward (1943), The Thin Man Goes Home (1944), Scene of the Crime (1949) and Summer Stock (1950), and being voted by exhibitors as the third most likely to be a “star of tomorrow'” in 1944, she did not achieve film stardom. She portrayed her own mother, Flora Parker DeHaven, in the Fred Astaire film Three Little Words (1950). After a long absence from the screen, DeHaven appeared as the love interest of Jack Lemmon in the 1997 comedy Out to Sea, also starring Walter Matthau.
DeHaven has been married four times to three different men. Her first husband was actor John Payne, star of The Restless Gun television series, whom she married on December 28, 1944, and divorced in 1950. Her second husband was real estate developer Martin Kimmel; they were married June 21, 1953, and divorced the following year. She was married to Richard Fincher from 1957 until 1963; they remarried in 1965 and divorced again in 1969.
She has two children with Payne, daughter, Kathleen Hope (born 1945), and son, Thomas John Payne (born 1947), and two children with Fincher, son, Harry (born 1958), and daughter, Faith (born 1962). DeHaven has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6933 Hollywood Blvd.
