Actress Ina Balin, Who Rescued Orphans

Ina Balin, stage, screen and TV actress, died yesterday at age 52 while seeking a lung transplant in a Connecticut hospital.

Gertrude Brooks, a New York publicist and longtime friend, said the featured player in such films as ``The Black Orchid,'' ``From the Terrace,'' with Paul Newman, and ``The Greatest Story Ever Told'' died of pulmonary hypertension, a steady deterioration of the lungs.

Although Balin was voted International Star of Tomorrow by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in 1961, it was as the adoptive parent of three South Vietnamese orphans and the rescuer of hundreds of others from a Saigon orphanage that she attracted most media coverage.

Balin first went to South Vietnam in 1967 as an entertainer of U.S. troops. In 1969, she visited the An Lac Orphanage and in 1972 went back to save some of the children she had met there.

The Saigon government had banned the removal of orphans and it was to change minds that she and a longtime friend, Betty Tisdale, made the journey.

Through determined persuasion, she and Tisdale, former secretary to Sen. Jacob Javits, R-N.Y., managed to load 217 orphans aboard an Air Force cargo plane and fly them to the Philippines. A TV movie, ``The Children of An Lac,'' was made based on her experiences in Vietnam.

Born Ina Rosenberg in Brooklyn, Balin studied drama and psychology at New York University. She made her Broadway debut in ``Compulsion'' before being cast as Anthony Quinn's daughter in the 1959 movie ``The Black Orchid.''