Claire Trevor was an American actress whose career encompassed stage, radio, television, and more than sixty films. Best known for hard-edged roles in film noir and westerns, she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Key Largo (1948), received two further Oscar nominations, and won an Emmy for Dodsworth.
Background
Claire Wemlinger was born on March 8, 1910, in New York City, the only child of Noel Wemlinger, a French-born clothing merchant, and his wife, Benjamina, who was of Irish birth. She grew up in New York and later in Larchmont, where she attended high school. Her father's clothing business failed during the Great Depression, and she went to work to help support the family.
Trevor's early circumstances connected the economic pressures of the Depression with the expanding opportunities of American theater and cinema. She studied at Columbia University and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts before entering stock theater in the late 1920s. Her stage work led to Broadway appearances and then to a Fox film contract in 1933.
Education
Trevor attended Columbia University in New York and studied for approximately six months at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Columbia, founded in 1754, was one of the major American universities in the city where Trevor began her professional life. The American Academy of Dramatic Arts, founded in 1884, provided specialized conservatory training for actors entering the American theater.
Her formal studies were followed by practical work in stock companies and Broadway productions. She appeared in Whistling in the Dark and The Party's Over before moving into feature films, a progression that reflected the close professional connection between New York theater and the growing Hollywood studio system during the 1930s.
Career
Trevor began performing in stock theater in the late 1920s and made her Broadway debut in Whistling in the Dark in 1932. She also appeared in The Party's Over in 1933 and later returned to Broadway in The Big Two in 1947. Broadway was the principal commercial theater district of the United States, and these productions established her as a stage performer before her sustained film career.
She signed with Fox in 1933 and made her screen debut in Life in the Raw. Her early Fox films included Baby Take a Bow, in which she played Shirley Temple's mother, and Dante's Inferno, opposite Spencer Tracy. She left the studio system seeking more substantial roles and earned her first Academy Award nomination for a brief but forceful performance as a streetwalker in William Wyler's Dead End (1937).
Trevor became one of the defining performers of American film noir, a postwar cycle characterized by crime narratives, moral ambiguity, shadowed visual styles, and psychologically conflicted characters. Her major noir performances included Street of Chance, Murder, My Sweet, Born to Kill, and Raw Deal. In John Ford's Stagecoach (1939), she played Dallas, a prostitute expelled from town by social moralists, and received top billing over John Wayne.
Her performance as Gaye Dawn, the alcoholic mistress of a gangster in John Huston's Key Largo (1948), won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She received another Oscar nomination for The High and the Mighty (1954). Her later film work included Two Weeks in Another Town and How to Murder Your Wife, while her career also extended to hundreds of radio and television appearances.
Trevor won the 1957 Primetime Emmy for her performance in Dodsworth on Producers' Showcase. She received a motion-picture star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960 and retired from acting in 1987. In later life she supported the arts in Orange County, including a contribution that helped renovate the Village Theatre at the University of California, Irvine; the theater was subsequently named in her honor.
Achievements
Trevor developed a career spanning stage, radio, television, and more than sixty feature films, becoming especially associated with the morally complex women of American film noir.
Her performance as Gaye Dawn in Key Largo demonstrated the dramatic range of the supporting actress and earned her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
She supported the arts in Orange County and contributed to renovation of the Village Theatre at the University of California, Irvine, which was later renamed the Claire Trevor Theatre.
(A biographical work about Claire Trevor by Carolyn McGivern.)
Personality
Trevor was consistently described in professional accounts as a versatile and disciplined performer whose screen portrayals combined toughness with vulnerability. Her public work and later support for arts education also reflected a sustained commitment to theater and young performers.
Quotes from others about the person
Film writer Kevin Thomas described Trevor as a consummate professional who may never have given a bad performance, emphasizing the vulnerability she brought to roles often written as hard or morally compromised women.
Interests
Arts patronage and support for theater education.
Connections
Trevor married Clark Andrews, the director of her radio show, in 1938; they divorced in 1942. In 1943 she married Navy lieutenant Cylos William Dunsmore, with whom she had her only child, Charles; they divorced in 1947.
In 1948 she married film producer Milton H. Bren and moved to Newport Beach, California. Bren had two sons from a previous marriage, Donald and Peter, and the family formed a blended household. Charles Bren died in the crash of Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 182 in 1978, and Milton Bren died from a brain tumor in 1979.
husband:
Clark Andrews
Director of Trevor's radio show; they married in 1938 and divorced in 1942.
husband:
Cylos William Dunsmore
A Navy lieutenant whom Trevor married in 1943; they had one child and divorced in 1947.
husband:
Milton H. Bren
Film producer whom Trevor married in 1948; he died in 1979.
Son:
Charles Bren
Trevor's only child, who died in the 1978 crash of Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 182.
