Irene Dunne

Actress Irene Dunne was born on December 20 1898 in Louisville Kentucky. She was “discovered” while playing the lead in a touring company’s version of Edna Ferber’s Show Boat a role she later reprised on the silver screen. Though her first film is now lost her next was the fourth movie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture – she played the leading female role: the sturdy wife of Richard Dix’s wandering Oklahoma pioneer Yancey Cravat whose nickname was the film’s title – Cimarron (1931). As Sabra Cravat only her second onscreen performance Ms. Dunne earned a Best Actress Oscar nomination.

Through the mid-1930’s she appeared in several largely forgettable dramas – as a budding opera singer whose taken advantage of by Adolphe Menjou’s title character in The Great Lover (1931) and as the neglected wife of Charles Bickford in No Other Woman (1933) etc. – before appearing as the “behind the scenes” talent for Helen Westley’s titled fashion designer Roberta (1935) opposite Randolph Scott. One of the highlights of this Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers hit is Dunne’s singing of the Jerome Kern-Otto Harbach classic “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”. She then helped Robert Taylor’s career take off playing the blinded woman who becomes the object of his Magnificent Obsession (1935) before she finally got to play Magnolia Hawks on screen in the first completely sound version of Show Boat (1936) opposite Allan Jones’s Gaylord Ravenal (though it’s Paul Robeson who sings movie’s most memorable version of the Kern-Oscar Hammerstein II song “Ol’ Man River”).

Theodora Goes Wild (1936) not only marks Irene Dunne’s first successful venture into comedic roles it’s also responsible for earning her the second of her five unrewarded Best Actress Academy Award nominations. In the title role Dunne is a small town author who writes a story about romance that her New York publisher promotes as a sex novel with racy covers illustrated by Melvyn Douglas’s character. Theodora’s conservative neighbors are outraged when the scandalous book sells well in their community but her identity remains a secret (because she’d used an alias) until Douglas arrives to exploit the situation and woo her. The next year Dunne appeared in the first of her three films opposite Cary Grant in Leo McCarey’s essential screwball comedy The Awful Truth (1937) which earned her another Best Actress Oscar nomination. The two play a divorcing couple bent on ruining the other’s life and plans to marry another – their fight includes a custody battle over their dog (Asta from The Thin Man (1934)) and a laugh-out-loud scene at a (Dunne sung) recital.

Two years later Dunne teamed with writer-producer-director McCarey again though opposite Charles Boyer this time in the original romance drama Love Affair (1939) for which she received her third Best Actress nomination in four years. McCarey co-wrote (with husband and wife team Sam & Bella Spewack) and produced her second pairing with Grant the hilarious romantic comedy My Favorite Wife (1940) and producer George Stevens directed their third film together the sad romance drama Penny Serenade (1941).

Ms. Dunne appeared in a couple of popular dramas during World War II the part fantasy A Guy Named Joe (1943) with Spencer Tracy and Van Johnson directed by Victor Fleming and director Clarence Brown’s episodic The White Cliffs of Dover (1944) – the only times she worked with either of these directors. Then like she had in Love Affair (1939) she initiated another role that other actresses would play at least twice more in later films when she played the titled English tutor in the romance drama Anna and the King of Siam (1946) opposite Rex Harrison.

But despite all these great and varied earlier parts (and her singing voice) Irene Dunne is perhaps best known for playing two very different mothers: as wife Vinnie to William Powell’s Clarence Day in the Michael Curtiz-directed comedy Life with Father (1947) which contains the hilarious sequence in which she attempts to explain to her husband that Clarence Jr.’s suit of clothes will cost nothing once he returns the porcelain pug dog model she’d bought to the store and (the second time she worked with director George Stevens) as the title character chronicled by her daughter – Barbara Bel Geddes as autobiographer Kathyrn Forbes – in the essential family drama I Remember Mama (1948) the last of her Best Actress Oscar nominated roles. After this one though she appeared on television through the early 1960’s Ms. Dunne made only three more films her last in 1952. She died September 4 1990 at 91 years of age.

© 2006 Turner Classic Movies – this article originally appeared on TCM’s official blog