Nina Foch was born on April 20, 1924. Her mother was American actress Consuela Flowerton, who returned to the U.S. after her marriage to Dutch classical music conductor Dirk Fock; they divorced when Nina was a toddler. Growing up in New York, her mother encouraged her artistic talent. She played the piano and enjoyed art, but was more interested in acting.
Foch`s movie fame came during the height of the 1940s when she played cool, aloof and often foreign women of sophistication. She ultimately would be featured in over 80 feature films and hundreds of television shows. The actress was a regular in John Houseman`s Playhouse 90 television series. In 1951, she appeared with Gene Kelly in the award-winning musical An American in Paris.
Foch later played Marie Antoinette in Scaramouche. Another noteworthy role came as Bithiah in Cecil B. DeMille`s The Ten Commandments, in which she played the Pharaoh`s daughter who found the baby Moses in the bullrushes and adopted him as her son. She was actually a year younger than Charlton Heston, who played Moses. Foch was nominated for an Academy Award for her supporting role in the 1954 boardroom drama Executive Suite, starring William Holden.
She appeared in 1960`s Spartacus opposite Kirk Douglas and Laurence Olivier as a woman who chooses gladiators to fight to the death in the ring, simply for her entertainment. In 1975, she appeared in the film Mahogany starring Diana Ross. She was cast as "Eva Frazier" in the Outer Limits episode "The Borderland".
On television, she was cast as the first murder victim of the Columbo mystery series starring Peter Falk, appearing in the pilot movie, Prescription: Murder (1968), with Gene Barry as her husband, a homicidal psychiatrist. More recently, she appeared on the television series Just Shoot Me, Bull and NCIS.
Nina Foch currently teaches "Directing the Actor" at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, where she has taught since the 1960s. She also works as an independent script-breakdown consultant for many prominent Hollywood directors. She lives in Beverly Hills, California, as she has for forty years, and has one child, a son, Dr. Dirk de Brito. Foch`s first husband was James Lipton of Inside the Actor`s Studio fame.