CLAIRE TREVOR

'Claire Trevor' (March 8, 1910 - April 8, 2000) was an Academy Award-winning American actress, nicknamed the "Queen of Film Noir" because of her many appearances in "bad girl” roles in film noir and other black-and-white thrillers. She appeared in over 60 films.

Contents

Early life

Career

Awards and nominations

Private life

Selected filmography

External links

Early life

Trevor was born as 'Claire Wemlinger' in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, New York, the only child of a 5th Avenue merchant-tailor and his wife. Her family was of Irish American and French American descent.

Career

Trevor's acting career spanned more than seven decades and included success in stage, radio, television and film. Trevor often played the hard-boiled blonde, and every conceivable type of "bad girl" role. After attending American Academy of Dramatic Arts, she began her acting career in the late '20s in stock. By 1932 she was starring on Broadway; that same year she began appearing in Brooklyn-filmed Vitaphone shorts. Her feature film debut came in ''Jimmy and Sally'' (1933) as "Sally Johnson". Other notable performances were in the classic western ''Stagecoach'' with John Wayne, and ''Murder, My Sweet'' opposite Dick Powell

Awards and nominations

Trevor won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her 1948 performance in ''Key Largo'', co-starring Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson and Lauren Bacall. She was also nominated for the same award for ''Dead End'', a 1937 melodrama in which she played a good girl who grows up to be a prostitute, and ''The High and the Mighty'', a 1954 airplane disaster epic starring John Wayne. In 1956, Trevor won an Emmy for Best Live Television Performance by an Actress for ''Dodsworth'', with Fredric March, on NBC's ''Producers' Showcase''.
The Claire Trevor School of the Arts at the University of California, Irvine was named in Trevor's honor. Both her Oscar and Emmy trophies are on display in the Arts Plaza there, next to the Claire Trevor Theatre.
She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Private life

Trevor married film producer Clark Andrews in 1938, but they divorced four years later. Her second marriage to Cylos William Dunsmoore produced a son, Charles. The marriage ended in divorce in 1947. The next year, Trevor married Milton Bren, another film producer and soon after moved to Newport Beach, California.
In 1978 her only biological child, her son Charles Dunsmoore, died in an airliner crash and her last husband, Milton Bren, died from a brain tumor in 1979. Trevor retired from acting in 1987. She made a special Academy Awards Appearance in 1998 at the 70th Academy Awards.
She died of respiratory failure in Newport Beach, April 8, 2000 at the age of 90, survived by several step-children by her marriage to Bren. Claire Trevor was cremated and her remains were scattered at sea.

Selected filmography

★ ''Dead End'' (1937)

★ ''The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse'' (1938)

★ ''Stagecoach'' (1939)

★ ''Allegheny Uprising'' (1939)

★ ''Dark Command'' (1940)

★ ''Honky Tonk'' (1941)

★ ''Murder, My Sweet'' (1944)

★ ''Born to Kill'' (1947)

★ ''The Velvet Touch'' (1948)

★ ''The Babe Ruth Story'' (1948)

★ ''Key Largo'' (1948)

★ ''Raw Deal'' (1948)

★ ''The High and the Mighty'' (1954)

★ ''How to Murder Your Wife'' (1965)

External links

★

★ Claire Trevor School of the Arts

★ Find-A-Grave profile for Claire Trevor

★ Photographs of Claire Trevor