Irene Dunne

LOUISVILLE native Irene Dunne is such a good actress that she never won an Academy Award, and many of the films she made during her career were so successful that they are rarely seen.

 The double paradox is easily explained.

 Like her frequent co-stars Cary Grant and Charles Boyer, Miss Dunne was so consistently splendid that - although she had five nominations - she was always taken for granted at Oscar time.

 And no fewer than 10 of her most popular films inspired remakes, causing the (usually superior) originals to be hidden away in studio vaults to avoid odious comparisons.

 Also like Grant, Miss Dunne retired early and has since refused all acting offers. It has been 33 years since her last theatrical feature, and a generation of filmgoers is mostly unfamiliar with her work.

 So her inclusion in this year's Kennedy Center Honors - the nation's highest tribute to performing artists - serves as a welcome reminder that she was one of the movies' most versatile and engaging actresses.

 The honors voted by a Kennedy Center comittee, have been awarded since 1978 for lifetime achievement and contribution to American culture. Miss Dunne told Charles Champlin of The Los Angeles Times that she was thrilled because this year's other honorees include her favorite comedian (Bob Hope), her favorite opera-singer (Beverly Sills), and the song-writing team who created her favorite musical, "My Fair Lady" (Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe). The sixth honoree is dancer-choreographer Merce Cunningham.

 Because of a back ailment, Miss Dunne was unable to attend a White House reception for the honorees last Sunday and the gala program that followed at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. She sent a message that "The show must go on."

 (Miss Dunne contacted by letter in her home in Los Angeles, had agreed to a telephone interview for this story before she left for Washington to receive the award. But, in her answering note, she failed to provide her unlisted telephone number. A subsequent letter and telegram to her went unanswered.)

 She did attend a dinner the night before the gala in the Benjamin Franklin Dining Room at the State Department, where gold medaillions on rainbow-colored ribbons were presented to the six artists. A New York times report described the actress as "fragile" in an electric blue silk gown. But she posed for the photographers and joked, "As soon as the lights come on, I seem to manage."

 Sunday's gala, produced by Nick Vanoff and George Stevens Jr. was taped for a two-hour CBS special to be aired at 9 p.m. Dec. 27. Samples of Miss Dunne's film work were shown, and Metropolitan Opera mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade sang "Make Believe" and "You Are Love" from "Show Boat." (Miss Dunne starred in both stage and film versions fo the Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein II musical.)

 She told Champlin of auditioning for Hammerstein. "It let to a story he loved to tell later. Not true, of course. Well, true but quite exaggerated. He said he couldn't use me, and I said, 'What do you mean?' and burst into tears. He patted me on the shoulder and saw me to the elevator and then - this is what I think is quite untrue - said he watched me from the window, walking sadly up the street, dragging my little sweater behind me." 

 Irene Maria Dunn (Hollywood added the final "e") was born at the home of her parents, Joseph J. and Adelaide Henry Dunn, at 507 E. Gray in Louisville. (The site is now a parking lot.) Miss Dunne's father, a Louisville native who attended St. Xavier High School, was a United States riverboat-boiler inspector. Her mother, once described by Miss Dunne as "gentle and fair" and "an accomplished musician," was from Newport, Ky. 

 Miss Dunne will celebrate a birthday Friday, but which one is a matter of controversy. The year of her birth has been reported as early as 1898 and as late as 1904. Champlin wrote that she says "sternly" that the latter date is correct. But, according to a 1939 report in The Courier-Journal, records at St. John's Catholic Church in Louisville showed that she was baptized in 1898.

 "Our home in Louisville was one of great happiness," she wrote in a 1944 syndicated newspaper autobiography. "This lazy, charming, lackadaisical atmosphere was a wonderful one for (younger brother) Charles and me." After her father's death when she was 11, Miss Dunne and her family moved to Madison, Ind., to live with her grandparents.

 She attended Webster College in St. Louis and earned a certificate as art instructor. But en route to a school-teaching job in Gary, Ind., she  followed an impulse and stepped off the train in Chicago to enter a voice contest and won a scholarship to the Chicago Musical College.

 During a college vacation, she won the title part in a road show of the musical "Irene," at the "amazing salary" of $150 a week. She failed a singing audition at New York's Metropolitan Opera in 1920, but made her Broadway debut two years later as a replacement fro Peggy Wood in a leading role in "The Clinging Vine."

 The story goes that Florenz Ziegfeld spotted her in an elevator and gave her the major break of her career - the role of Magnolia in his touring production of "Show Boat."

She made her film debut in "Leathernecking" in 1930. But she became a movie star - and earned her first Oscar nomination - when she played Sabra Cravat, the pioneer girl who becomes a congresswoman in "Cimarron." (The film, which was the biggest moneymaker of 1931, was remade in 1961 with Maria Schell as Sabra.) 

 Miss Dunne's next nomination came for "Theodora Goes Wild" with Melvyn Douglas (1936), in which, after a series of tear-jerkers in which she was earnest and dignified, she threw over the soap-opera traces and revealed her gift for antic comedy.

Champlin wrote that her offscreen image, despite the madcap role, was of a lady in a gypsy encampment. "I was in Hollywood but not of it, I suppose," she told him. "They used to call me a lady and I resented that title for years. Then I thought, 'Well, there are worse things you can be called,' so I gave up the fight. People who know me say I'm much more like Theodora." 

 Her other Oscar nominations were for "The Awful Truth" (another comedy and her first co-starring stint with Cary Grant, remade in 1953 as "Let's Do It Again" with Jane Wyman and Ray Milland); "Love Affair" (a romantic comedy-drama, her first with Charles Boyer, remade in 1957 as "An Affair To Remember" with Deborah Kerr and Grant); and "I Remember Mama" (as the Norwegian-American mother recalled in Kathryn Forbes' memoir, "Mama's Bank Account")

 Her other films that provided later vehicles for other actresses were "Back Street" (1932, remade in 1941 with Margaret Sullavan and in 1951 with Susan Hayward); "Roberta" (1935, remade in 1952 as "Lovely to Look At" with Kathryn Grayson); "Magnificent Obsession" (1935, remade in 1954 with Jane Wyman; "Show Boat" (1936, remade in 1951 with Kathryn Grayson); "When Tomorrow Comes" (1939, remade in 1957 as "Interlude" with June Allyson); "My Favorite Wife" (1940, remade in 1963 as "Move Over Darling" with Doris Day); and "Anna and the King of Siam" (1946, remade as the musical "The King and I" in 1956 with Deborah Kerr).

Another of her hits, "Life With Father" (the 1947 film version of the Howard Lindsay-Russell Crouse play, with William Powell and Elizabeth Taylor) is frequently seen on television.

 Producer Steven Spielberg has plans to add to the list of Dunn remakes  - "A Gua Named Joe" (a 1943 ghostly romance with Spencer Tracy). One of her hits that was somehow never redone, "Penny Serenade" (1941) will be shown at 7 p.m. Feb. 17 at the Kentucky Center for the Arts as part of a festival honoring director George Stevens.

 Miss Dunne brought a captivating elegance of spirit to all her roles, and her infectious laugh was especially delicious. Grant - no slouch himself - considered her comic timing the best in the business. And film historian Leslie Halliwell commented on British television that of all the Hollywood celebrities he had ever met, Miss Dunne was by far the most unaffected and charming.

 Her private life has been as dignified as her screen career. She was married to a dentist, Dr. Franics D. Griffin, from 1928 until he died of a heart attack in 1965. The couple adopted a daughter, Mary Frances, in 1925.

 Miss Dunne told Champlin, "The night in New York I met my future husband, I was dancing with another fellow and he said, 'Where are you from?' I said, 'Madison, Indiana.' Then I danced with this new fellow and he asked me the same thing. He seemed a more cosmopolitan type, somehow, so I said I was from Louisville. The two men compared notes later and one of them said, 'That girl doesn't even know where she's from.' But my husband-to-be evidently found it intriguing."

 Miss Dunne has long been associated with various charities, including the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association and the American Red Cross. The University of Notre Dame gave her its Laetare Medal as the outstanding Catholic layman of 1949.

 (The Washington Post noted that some recepients of this year's Kennedy Honors have social ties to the White House: Bob Hope is a Reagan pal, and Irene Dunne is a friend of Nancy Reagan and Bonita Granville Wrather, a member of the Kennedy Center board. Wrather said that Miss Dunne "is a neigbor of mine and a social friend, and she was already on the artists' comittee list. She's just one of those great '40s actresses like Bette Davis and Claudette Colbert. I think she's long overdue. You shouldn't wait too long, you know.")

 Miss Dunne has returned to Louisville several times over the years - most glamorously in 1940 (with co-star Randolph Scott) when the world premiere of "My Favorite Wife" was held at the old Rialto Theatre, and most recently in 1965, when she received the Bellarmine College Medal for "her contribution to American society in the entertainment arts and in a variety of civic and philantropic activities."