Meet Caren Marsh Doll, the Oldest Living Cast Member of ‘The Wizard of Oz’

The Wizard of Oz first appeared on the silver screen in 1939 and, according to one study, went on to become the most influential film of all time. The beloved movie celebrates its 86th birthday this year, and while sadly the vast majority of the cast and crew are no longer around to raise a glass to the iconic film, Caren Marsh Doll is. Marsh Doll was Judy Garland’s stand-in and, at 105 years old, she’s one of the last surviving actresses from the Golden Age of Hollywood.

Caren Marsh Doll (then known as Caren Marsh; Doll wasn’t added until her marriage to Bill Doll in 1950) got her start in Tinseltown as a dancer in the musical Rosalie (1937). She was cut during the audition, but she simply changed her clothes and tried again in the hope that the casting director wouldn’t recognize her. They didn’t, and she booked her first job. While dancing on another film, Caren was spotted by someone from MGM and hired to be Judy Garland’s stand-in for The Wizard of Oz. In her own words, she was the perfect pick: “with both of us at 4 feet, 11 inches tall, with dark hair and eyes, we could have been taken for twins.”

A stand-in needs to match their actor counterpart as closely as possible in regard to clothing, coloring, height, and weight so that the technical elements of a scene can be set up accurately. To spare the movie’s star of this tedious process, Caren endured it instead. “I went down that yellow brick road over and over while the camera was being adjusted, while the lighting was being adjusted,” Caren explained in a 2009 interview. “When the cameraman and the director were satisfied with the result, then they called Judy. I stepped out, she stepped in, they shot the scene.” As well as skipping down the yellow brick road countless times, she was also the test subject for the tornado scene. She recalled in another interview that “those wind machines blew hard!”

It isn’t always certain which of Garland’s stand-ins and doubles—there was also Bobbie Koshay, Dorothy Andre, and Jean Kilgore—played Dorothy in specific scenes. Although doubles usually appear on-camera while stand-ins stay off-camera, this isn’t a strict rule. The most pivotal scene involving one of these women takes place when Dorothy opens the door of her sepia-toned farmhouse to the Technicolor world of Munchkinland. To film the transition from black-and-white to color without cutting away, the interior of the house was painted in sepia tones and the whole shot was filmed in color. One of Garland’s substitutes (Koshay is often named, but without evidence) donned a black-and-white version of the gingham dress to open the door, and when the camera moved past her, Garland in her iconic blue dress stepped into frame and out into Oz.

Caren continued acting and dancing in films over the next decade, but her Hollywood career came to an abrupt end when she was involved in a plane crash on July 12, 1949. She was one of 48 passengers and crew who were aboard the plane that crashed into the Santa Susana Mountains on its way to Burbank; just 13 people survived. Marsh Doll’s right foot was badly injured—she described it looking like “red hamburger with white noodles sticking out”—but a fellow passenger saved her life by dragging her from the fiery wreck.

Initially, she was told by a doctor that her foot would have to be amputated. A second doctor was able to save her foot, but said that she wouldn’t be able to dance again. “I refused to accept that,” she recalled to the Los Angeles Times in 1999. Although Marsh Doll never returned to the big screen, she proved the doctors wrong. Even at the age of 80, she was still dancing and teaching a variety of styles—from country to ballroom.

At 105 years old, Caren Marsh Doll has outlived almost the entirety of The Wizard of Oz cast. The only other surviving alumni are Priscilla Montgomery Clark and Valerie Lee, both of whom played munchkins when they were children and are now 95 and 94, respectively. Today, Marsh Doll lives in Palm Springs, California. Her husband, Bill, passed away in 1979, but he’s survived by their son, Jonathan. Marsh Doll is just as surprised as anyone that she’s still here. (She’s more than twice as old as Judy Garland was when she tragically died at just 47.) In a Facebook post celebrating her 104th birthday, she wrote: “We’re all on our own yellow brick road, but who knew mine would be this long?”

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