Background
Sinclair was born Ella Delores Cook and raised in San Diego, California.
Sinclair was born Ella Delores Cook and raised in San Diego, California.
Sinclair was also a painter and had in her youth been a Conover model. Her husband, for a time, was Broadway producer and director, George Abbott. As a young woman she began modeling in Los Angeles, and in 1944, she left Hollywood for Manhattan, where she modeled for the Conover agency and acted in summer stock.
"I was the arty type," she recalled in a 1951 interview with The New York Times.
"I wanted to go to New York and be a real actress.” And in the 1940s, she began to acquire experience as a freelance television actress, appearing on 36 programs in two years. But it was Columbia Broadcasting System board chairman William South. Paley who singled Sinclair out, in 1951, by giving her a seven-year contract with Columbia Broadcasting System, one of the first acting contracts granted by the network.
The New York Times reported that she was the first dramatic actress "to enter video"s incubator for hatching its own stars." In the 1960s, as her television career faded, although attending the Actors Studio in Manhattan, headed by Lee Strasberg, and appearing on the stage, Sinclair, in the main, retired from acting, and devoted most of her creative energies to painting. She studied with artist Fleur Cowles and specialized in oil canvases of flowers and animals, and portraits of friends.
After leaving the United States. and living in Italy for a few years, in the 1970s she returned to Los Angeles, where she directed local theater productions.
Later she moved to Phoenix, Arizona and lived there until her death in 2000 at the age of seventy-seven.