The Irene Dunne Site
Well Dunne, Irene
by Louise Baer
Irene Dunne and her husband (shown with her) long since worked out a solution to their career-marriage problems. They keep their private lives to themselves and neither interfere with the other's professional activities. They are a somewhat rare Hollywood item - a happily married duo, each very successful in a career. (Dallinger photo)
Never before has a Hollywood actress benn summoned to New York for the express purpose of having herself covered with medals, but Irene Dunne has been charmingly rewarded for outstanding work in "I Remember Mama" as a paratrooper for his missions over enemy territory.
With no prospect of being an Academy Award winner this year, Miss Dunne is spinning circles around the gals who are. Within a short period Miss Dunne received the Laetare Medal as the year's outstanding member of the Catholic laity in America, the Protestant Motion Picture Council Award, The American Motherhood Pictures Award, and was honored at the National Conference of Christians and Jews.
Between these stints she sandwitched in a "Theatre Guild of the Air" performance of "The Late Christopher Bean," appeared on "We, the People" for the American Heart Association, took in a few shows, attended the fabulous March of Dimes Fashion Show and was available for all the luncheons and dinner parties her friens showered upon her.
At all times she was beautifully groomed, completely relaxed and smiling. "If people would only remember to smile," she told me, "it would help them out in so many situations. In the theatre, on the screen, or at fashions shows, I come in contact with it all the time. Those frightened little amateurs who want to appear so wordly and sure of themselves that they forget the actor's greatest ace-in-the-hole, the ability to smile and put everyone, including themselves, at ease."
Irene is easy to talk with, easy to know and very east on the eye. Her wardrobe consists chiefly of suits with soft dressmaker detail and small pill-box type hats. She is an enthusiastic golfer and is the only woman in the Hollywood movie colony who has two holes-in-one to her credit, and she is a hummer. Whenever she hears music she hums right along with it and her companions pretend not to notice or she would stop it at once.
Actually she doesn't place one of her roles above the other. She does like the variety of parts she has created and now that "Mama" is finished and the audiences still are shouting she wants to do a comedy.
In the past six or five years Miss Dunne has devoted more and more of her time to charitable projects. Recently she has helped establish a school in Los Angeles for Negro children. She has represented the motion picture industry for the American Cancer Society, was a powerful force in the National Heart movement of 1948 and has now accepted chairmanship of the women's committee of The American Heart Association for 1949.
The wife of a physician, Dr. Francis Griffin, she is probably more "health minded" than the average Hollywood personality and, as the mother of a fourteen-year-old daughter, she is civic minded and interested in all programms that make a healthier and happier living.
Although stories of former Ziegfeld beauties are still written and read with interest, the name of Irene Dunne never appears among them. Yet she was hand picked by the great glorifier for the Chicago company of "Show Boat" and, as a result of her performance in that show received her first film offer.
"I suppose I am different from the average Hollywood person visiting New York," she explained. "I do not come here just to look at the shows. Of course, I do see some of them, but I really come to see the sights, to visit my friends, to see the snow or to know the thrill of springtime. New York is tremendously stimulating."
Miss Dunne is like pink champagne, bubbling, lovely to look at and quite unusual. She lives quietly in Hollywood and has no aspirations to become a character nor aversion to becoming a character actress.
"Life goes on," she says, "and thank goodness we are lucky enough to go along with it." The fact that she is rarely recognized off-screen pleases her. "That just goes to show you what a wonder city Hollywood is," she laughts. "I don't recognize myself IN pictures and my fans don't recognize me AWAY from them."
(The Syracuse Post Standard, 05.08.1949)