Irene Dunne Comes To Indianapolis

AN HOUR with Irene Dunne in her room at the Claypool hotel before she left the city for Madison yesterday afternoon, convinced a confirmed admirer that the state of Indiana lost a splendid person when it gave the world a great actress. The girl who looked at life through the charm and culture of the quaint, historic town on the Ohio has come back to visit the friends of her childhood and student days without a trace of the theater's artificiality in her make-up.

 It is always an inspiration to learn that an actress (or an actor) is as natural and appealing in character off stage as on. Miss Dunne is as gracious, sincere, considerate and lovely as the heroines she plays in the films. She is very much as you who have enjoyed her fine, sympathetic, understanding portrayal of screen roles must have imagined her to be.

 Miss Dunne arrived in Indianapolis Sunday afternoon from New York where she had spent several weeks with her husband, Dr. F. D. Griffin. While movie writers of the "romantic" stamp would like for her to say that theirs is the ideal marital arrangement, she frankly admits that parting for her still is sweet sorrow and that the long periods of seperation forced by widely divergent careers are irksome to her. She looks forward to a reunion in July, when Dr. Griffin will rejoin her on the coast. She does not intend to make pictures all her life. She has her heart set on a house in Westchester. Then she would like to travel.

 THE STAGE gave this star her first success, but she is loyal to the screen which gave her the greatest fame. She is not, at the moment, interested in returning to the stage, although the Theater Guild has submitted the script of a play in which she is invited to appear next fall. Her present absorption in the movies, her enthusiasm suggested, may be due to the fact that at last she is to have the chance to appear in a musical.

 Miss Dunne, than the star of Ziegfeld's "Show Boat" in Chicago, was lured to the coast three years ago to play in a musical film. That picture was never made. Instead, she was selected for the role Sabra Cravat in "Cimarron," which established her as one of the foremost dramatic actresses in Hollywood. She has suffered untold mental tortures as the downtrodden woman, wife of mistress, and she is eager to be lively and gay - and her own age - again. Such pictures as "Back Street" and "The Secret of Madame Blanche" have proved Miss Dunne's ability to take a character from girlhood to old age, but they haven't allowed her admirers to see a great deal of her as she really is - and to hear her beautifully cultivated singing voice.

 SHE WILL SING in her next picture. It's to be a musical comedy presently titled "Lady Sal," but we have an idea you'll see it under another title because Miss Dunne doesn't like that one. She didn't know until we told her that RKO-Radio also plans to star her with the British actor, Leslie Banks, in "Stingaree," the story of an Australian Robin Hood. And she will sing again in it. She told us that she has been "coaching" while in New York, just to be ready for this opportunity which has been delayed from Hollywood's first musical cylce to the second.

 MISS DUNNE is proudest of her performances in "Cimarron" and "Back Street." The former, of course, stands to this day as one of the screen's outstanding pictures of all time. She would rather appear in a few good films than in many of average worth and she is not interested in stardom for its own sake alone. She would have preferred not to have been starred in her latest picture, "The Silver Cord" (now at the Apollo), since the stellar role really is in the hands of Laura Hope Crews, the veteran character actress. 

 In this connection Col. Collins of the Apollo told us he would have starred Miss Dunne whether the studio had billed her that way or not. He knows that a series of consistently fine performances in plays good, bad and indifferent has given the public a faith in her which means something.

 She spoke highly of Frances Dee, the young actress who plays with her in "The Silver Cord," and Sunday night she met Miss Dee's father, Frank Dee, who is in business here.

 THiNKING that many of you who admired her work on the screen might like the opportunity of seeing her as she is, we asked Miss Dunne if she had considered a personal appearance tour. It was, she agreed, something to think about if it were for a period of eight or ten weeks. She is doing none of it, however, on her present vacation, although she has been invited to appear at a theater in Chicago. She would sing, of course. She set out to be a singer in her student days and her goal was the Metropolitan Opera House rather than the RKO-Radio lot. 

 Miss Dunne studied music almost a year at the old Indianapolis Conservatory in Woodruff Place, but she did not have many contacts here because the girls were not allowed out after 10 o'clock at night, a rule which seriously restricted social activities.

 While she is in Madison, she would like nothing better than to drift with the current of the Ohio river in a row boat. But such pleasantries, she fears, are not for girls who have grown up to be movie stars.

(Indianapolis Star, June 6, 1933 - article courtesy of Charles Huffer)