Irene Dunne

"FOR MY CAREER, I cry," Irene Dunne once said. But for her immortality, she laughed.

 Irene Dunne, who was first nominated for an Academy Award for Cimarron (1931), was an actress of intelligence and flexibility. Cary Grant said she was his favorite leading lady, adding that doing a picture with her was more like "flirtation" than work. And indeed, their flirtations are among the great comic ornaments of their era. His attempt to woo her back into marriage in that greatest of all romantic comedies, The Awful Truth (1937, for which she was nominated for an Oscar); her attempt to reclaim their marriage in My Favorite Wife (1940); their shy, sly courtship in Penny Serenade (1941) - this in incomparable work.

 The first time Dunne was asked to ligthe up was for the delicious Theodora Goes Wild (1936), another Academy Award-nominated role. Although the film was a great success, she resisted her gift for comedy. Possibly her reluctance, as she hinted to historian James Harvey, grew out of her discovery that comedy came rather easily to her.

 Irene Dunne's career in pure comedy was relatively brief. Although Penny Serenade and Love Affair (the 1939 film that garnered her another Oscar nomination) had their lovely lighter moments, they turned weepy before long, and the war years essentially destoyed the screwball impulse. She was a tragedy-touched ferry pilot in A Guy Named Joe (1943) and a widow in The White Cliffs of Dover (1944).

In the postwar period she embraced matriarchy tentatively in Anna and the King of Siam (1946); giddily in Life With Father (1947); soberly in I Remember Mama (1948, for which she received her fifth Academy Award nomination); and grandly as Queen Victoria, mother to an entire empire, in The Mudlark (1950).

 She made just one more film after that, and then slipped into retirement. When James Harvey visited Irene Dunne in 1978, she still observed some secretiveness alight in her eyes, some bemusement - possibly with herself and her legend - that she did not choose to share. It remains quite the most attractive of all the movies' mand mysteries.

(Architectural Digest, April 1990 - Thanks to Charles Huffer)