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Marta Kristen was born Birgit Annalisa Rusanen on February 26, 1945, in Oslo, Norway, to a Finnish mother and a German soldier who died near the end of World War II in Europe. At just two months old, she was placed in an orphanage. In 1949, Dr. and Mrs. Harold Soderquist from Detroit, Michigan, adopted her and brought her to the United States, where she was renamed Martha Soderquist.
In 1959, the family relocated to Los Angeles, and Marta attended Santa Monica High School for one year before graduating from Hollywood Professional School. Producer and director James B. Harris discovered the petite, aspiring actress, secured her an agent, and she soon landed roles on television shows such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955) and The Loretta Young Show (1953), also known as The New Loretta Young Show. In 1963, Marta married a graduate student she met six months earlier. Her career gained momentum, especially with her role as the mermaid "Lorelei" in Beach Blanket Bingo (1965). However, she is best remembered for her role as "Judy Robinson" in Lost in Space (1965). Despite the show's initial promise, Marta later expressed disappointment, recalling an episode involving talking vegetables and questioning her choice after five years at the Actors Studio. Furthermore, her screen time was limited; in the popular episode The Sky Pirate (1966), where guest star Albert Salmi—also of Finnish descent—appeared, she had only one line of dialogue, saying "good-bye" to the pirate.
Offscreen, Marta sought to reconnect with her origins. In 1969, while pregnant with her first child and traveling alone through Europe, she located her biological mother in Finland and met an older sister she had never known. Later that year, she returned to the U.S., where her daughter Laura was born. Prioritizing motherhood, Marta focused on raising Laura and chose to appear in over 40 television commercials instead of films or TV series to minimize time away from home. She divorced her first husband in 1973. The following year, she married attorney Kevin Kane; their marriage lasted until his death in 2016.
Marta has remained somewhat active in television and film, including a role in the 1998 Lost in Space movie. In 1997, she discovered additional family members—a younger half-brother in Australia and a half-sister in Finland—whom she had previously not known about.
Always placing family before career, Marta revealed in an interview that she was "co-parenting my daughter's child, Lena." She added, "I used to do a lot of theater and traveled a lot. But those things are out of the picture for the next couple of years.
