A friend of her mother´s who had a daughter striving for a career on Broadway advised her to try for a part in the road company about to toar the Broadway musical called Irene. Miss Dunne sang "Kiss Me Again" at her try-out and was offered the lead. Not because of her Christian name, of course, but because of her face and her voice, and the way she used them.

 The tour lasted four months. When she got back to NYC and agent - a new acquisition - obtained a small role for her on Broadway in a musical-comedy starring Peggy Wood called The Clinging Vine, which opened in ´23. The part - as a secretary - was over four minutes after the curtain went up, which meant that Miss Dunne had conciderable time to pursue the musical studies she hoped would ultimately get her accepted by the Metropolitan. That Miss Dunne had, even then, an astute publicity sense is indicated by the letter she wrote to the author of The Clinging Vine, Zelda Sears, thanking her for making the part of the secretary small and for placing it in play´s first four minutes.

 Miss Dunne had no difficulty thereafter getting parts in Broadway musical comedies. In ´24 she was in Lollipop; in ´25 in The City Chap; in ´26 in Sweetheart Time; in Yours Truly in `27; and in She´s My Baby, a Beatrice Lillie vehicle, in ´28.

 In June of ´28 Miss Dunne married a man older than herself, a NYC dentist named Francis J.[sic] Griffin. He was a New Englander and none too enthusiastic about the theatre and theatre people. But he did not object to her continuing her career. After a two-month honeymoon in Europe Miss Dunne began, in the title role of Luckee Girl, what proved to be her last appereance on Broadway.

 Miss Dunne has said, or her publicity agents have said on her behalf, that she got the part of Magnolia in the Chicago company of Show Boat accidentally - as the result of entering early in ´29, an office-building elevator that contained Florenz Ziegfeld. However her casting in the part came about, it was the turn in her destiny that led her to Hollywood. She was so patent a success in Chicago singing "Make Believe" and the other beautiful Show Boat songs that RKO Radio gave her a contract.

 Her screen debut was in a nothing called Leathernecking (´30) which she has always wished to forget, but her second screen role was in Cimarron (´31), one of the great films about the settling of our West. William LeBaron is suppossed to have been the one who prevailed on director Wesley Ruggles and others to give Miss Dunne the role of Sabra, who ages in the film from 17 to 80. To clinch the part Miss Dunne prevailed on make-up artist Ernie Westmore, and photographer Ernest Bracken, to spend a Saturday afternoon putting on film the proof that she could bring it off. Cimarron was adapted by Howard Eastbrook from the Edna Ferber novel and is one of the best of the few motion pictures that whole-heartedly exalt the American past.

 The following year she lent herself to a role she shouldn´t have, that of the mistress in Back Street, Fannie Hurst´s feminist propaganda against what was then called the double standard. It is a woman´s picture from start to finish, and such a surefire boxofficer it has been re-made twice, first with Margaret Sullavan and Charles Boyer, and then in color with Susan Hayward and John Gavin. The beauty and charisma of Miss Dunne were mis-used to enhance Miss Hurst´s "message" about wicked and selfish males mis-using sweet and innocent females, and Miss Dunne has always referred to Back Street as trash.

 She was used in eight more "four-handkerchief" porgrammers in the next two years. Two of them, however, had an idea and then amid the goo. In fact one of the two, The Silver Cord, has as much to say to the present generation as it had to the one for which Sidney Howard wrote it. It also has a wonderful performance by Laura Hope Crews as the mother who uses every wile to keep her son subservient to her. Miss Dunne played the daughter-in-law who ultimately convinces her husband his mother is not the unselfish paragon he has thougth her.

 The other programmer with an idea, Ann Vickers, is not so well wrought a film, primarly because Sinclair Lewis´novel is not wrought as well as Sidney Howard´s play. Lewis had wretched luck with women and never had his heart in depicting the positive aspects of the career-woman. Ann Vickers is a piece of pasteboard, and even if she hadn´t been Miss Dunne would have been miscast. But some of the ideas about prison reform in Ann Vickers atone for some of its flaws.

 In ´34 RKO teamed Miss Dunne again with Richard Dix, her co-star of Cimarron. The film was the expensively mounted Western called Stingaree, and gave her an opportunity to sing.

 One of the programmers-for-women that´s not entirely vacuous is the beautifully mounted cinemazation of Edith Wharton´s The Age Of Innocence that RKO released in ´34. Miss Dunne has the role Katherine Cornell played on the stage on Broadway - the estranged wife of a Polish count, in the NYC of the 1870s, falls in love with her cousin´s fiance. John Boles is opposite Miss Dunne and Helen Westley´s performance as the disapproving matriarch is especially worth seing.

 The following year RKO at last made use of Miss Dunne´s singing voice itn the musical, Sweet Adeline. It permitted her to be seen singing such lovely Jerome Kern songs as "Why Was I Born" and "Don´t Ever Leave Me," which had been sung on Broadway with the poignancy of the merely physical woman. Miss Dunne sang them with the poignancy of the complete woman.

Another filmmusical, Roberta, followed. It too has songs that have become standards ("Smoke Gets In Your Eyes," "Yesterday," "Lovely To Look At" and "Touch Of Your Hand"). And it has Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers at their happiest. Roberta is not shown on television because of the legal protection given re-makes against the competition of superior originals. This is a cultural crime, and one our Supreme Court should do something about. The Astaire-Rogers dances, and Miss Dunne´s renditions of the Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach songs, comprise a felicity that would beguile even the neurotics of today. Miss Dunne, incidentally, was billed above Astaire and his new dancing partner (Rogers).

 Then, after playing the blind girl in Magnificent Obsession whose sight is restored by the playboy-surgeon who had caused the accident that blinded her (Robert Taylor), Miss Dunne, who was no longer under contract to RKO, was employed by Universal for the ´36 film version of Show Boat, which, nostagically, seems much better than it was thought to be at the time of its first release. Reason there were reservations then: except for "Ol´Man River" Jerome Kern´s wonderful score for the stage production had been discarded and songs by other composers substituted.

 Miss Dunne´s screen portrayal as Magnolia is as good as her stage one; Alan Jones in the male lead is adequate; Paul Robeson, Helen Morgan and Charles Winninger repeat the excellent performances they gave on the stage; the costumes and sets are opulent; James Whale´s direction is still worth studying.

 Film versions of Broadway musicals had been Hollywood´s most lucrative use of sound in the first decade of sound´s existence and so many had been made the public revolted. In ´36* Miss Dunne astutely decided to see whether she could be as effective in straight comedy as she had proved to be in the musical kind. The last film Dunne filmusical was High, Wide And Handsome (´37).

* 1936 was not only the year of "the great devide" in her career but a similar one in her personal life. At its beginning she and Dr. Griffith [sic] adopted a girl from the New York Foundling Home; he gave up his NYC practice; they made the Beverly Hills house Miss Dunne had been occupying with her mother their legal residence; and Mrs. Dunne died.

 The vehicle she chose for her first essay at comedy was Theodora Goes Wild, a screwball comedy about a small-town girl who writes a "daring" novel and then tries to live up to the "unconventionalities" of her novel´s heroine. Melvyn Douglas played the sophisticated artist who finally catches on to what she is doing, and Richard Boleslawski´s direction made most of it seem funny. Miss Dunne´s performance, however, was an uncertain one. The NY "Times" thought it "too cute" and that "farce is not her forte." Nevertheless, it brought her her second nomination for an Academy Award (her first was for Cimarron).

 She herself did not doubt her ability to do comedy and readily assented when Columbia proposed that she appear with Cary Grant in The Awful Truth, to be directed by Leo McCarey. All did not go smoothly during the filming, but McCarey made it one of the best screwball comedies of the 30s, and he won a best Director Academy Award for his still amusing direction of Miss Dunne as the wife who wins back the husband (Cary Grant) she has divorced. Miss Dunne was nominated for an Oscar the third time.

 "Comedy is more difficult than drama," said Miss Dunne at this juncture of her career. "Good comedy technique is harder to acquire. The shadings of meaning and character are subtler, the timing is everything. A flick of a finger can be important - if it´s flicked in the right way, and the whole gesture is small. Once learned, comedy techniques can be used for drama merely by slowing them down. An actress who can comedy can do drama, but the vice versa isn´t necessarily true. Big emotional scenes are much easier to play than comedy. An onion can bring tears to your eyes, but what vegetable can make you laugh?"

 Love Affair (´39), in which McCarey directed Miss Dunne and Charles Boyer, is not a comedy. It´s soapera, but Leo McCarey invested it with so much charm it can still been seen without pain (McCarey collaborated on the script with Mildred Cram). Dunne and Boyer worked as well together as she and Grant had. Maria Ouspenkaya added a little substance to this sudser about lovers separating and promising to meet in six months if they still loved. It was re-made in ´57 with Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant (An Affair To Remember).

Miss Dunne was now at the peak of her career, and grossing $400.000 a year. Her films were also grossing huge sums, especially expensively mounted programmers like My Favorite Wife with Cary Grant, Unfinished Business with Robert Montgomery, and Penny Serenade with Grant (´41).

 The last named is a sentimentality George Stevens lifted from banality. Dunne and Grant play a couple who adopt a child and most of it consists of flashbacks. The sets and photography are outstanding. Penny Serenade contains ons of Grant´s best performances (he was nominated for a Best Actor Academ Award).

 During World War II Miss Dunne made two films that were primarily designed to assist the war effort.

The first, A Guy Named Joe, endeavours to make life after death believable to non-believers, and ist succedds to a surprising degree. Spencer Tracy plays an Air Force pilot who, killed in action, returns to earth, invisibly to the living, to help young pilots, his friends, and his beloved. It´s Tracy´s picture all the way, and Miss Dunne´s only one with him. Victor Fleming directed.

 The other picture primarily designed to help the war effort was The White Cliffs Of Dover (`44). Based on the Alice Duer Miller poem ("The White Cliffs") it tells of an American girl who loses her English husband in World War I and her son in WW-II, and in elucidating her readjustments to the two bereavements, reveals British and American differences - con amore. Many of Clarence Brown´s directorial touches are thrilling, especially his handling of crowd scenes. The cast, which included a youthful Elizabeth Taylor, is grade-A.

 The two Irene Dunne films most people remember are Anna And The King Of Siam and Life With Father. Both came right after WW-II - Anna in ´46 Life a year later.

 Anna was directed by John Cromwell, who had directed Miss Dunne in the early years of her career. It´s a witty cinemazation of Margaret Landon´s book about an English governess who went out to the Siam of a century ago to teach the King´s 67 children, and taught the King some of the reasons for Western ways. Rex Harrison is a delight as the King, and Miss Dunne is a perfect foil for him. The film has a great deal of wit, and very intelligent sets.

 Many people say that Miss Dunne was born to play the wife in Life With Father, and I am inclined to agree with them. I also think William Powell´s performance as Mr. Day is his raison d`etre. At the time of Life With Father´s release there was practically unanimous praise - from critics who had seen the Howard Lindsay-Russell Crouse stage play several times. The cast, the sets, Michael Curtiz´direction, Max Steiner´s score, all conspired to make the crises in the Day brownstone on NYC´s Madison Avenue in the summer of 1883 the kind of Americana to which the American heart responds.

 Warners´ solution of the "billing" problem posed by Life With Father was amusing and is still remembered in Hollywood´s advertising and publicity circles. On the screen, during the unrolling of the credits, on-&-off lights first have Miss Dunne´s name in the first place, then Mr. Powell´s in that position. In newspapers, Miss Dunne´s name would be first one day, Mr. Powell´s would be the next.

 Miss Dunne made only four films after Life With Father.

 Her fine portrayal of a Norwegian-American mother in San Francisco at the turn of the century in I Remember Mama, which George Stevens directed, brought her a fifth nomination for an Academy Award (her fourth was for Love Affair). Never A Dull Moment is an imitation of The Egg And I, with Fred MacMurray as a rodeo-hand who marries song-writer Dunne.

In The Mudlark (´50) Miss Dunne portrayed an aging Queen Victoria - not to the satisfaction of the NYC "critics." Miss Dunne´s last film was a worthless Universal programmer with Dean Jagger called It Grows on Trees (´52).

 Miss Dunne did some television work ("Ford Theatre," "Schlitz Playhouse of Stars"). In ´57 President Eisenhower appointed her one of our five alternate delegates to the United Nations. Her husband died in ´65. Her last public appereance to date was at the Academy Awards presentation ceremony in ´67 when she gave the Jean Hersholt Award to George Bagnall for his work on behalf of the Motion Picture Relief Fund.

 Miss Dunne has been active in many Catholic charities and some years ago Notre Dame University gave her its Laetare Medal. In presenting it to her the Rev. John J. Cavanaugh summed up her career rather well, saying:

 "The period of your screen career fell within the years when the effect of the economic depression, and the aftermath of a world war, had brought discouragement, gloom and sorrow into American homes. During those years you brought wholesome and inspiring dramas that gave encouragement and hope, and stories that wrinkled with healing laughter the taut features of worryworn faces."

(Films In Review, December 1969)