Claire Trevor Dead At 91

Claire Trevor, the sultry-voiced actress who appeared in more than 60 films and won an Academy Award for her 1948 performance as a boozy, broken-down torch singer in Key Largo, died Saturday.

Trevor died at a hospital near her Newport Beach home, said Richard Elbaum, a spokesman for the family. He did not know the cause of death.

He gave her age as 90, based on a birthdate of March 8, 1910. Some movie Web sites, including Hollywood.com, and biographies list a 1909 year of birth, which would have made her 91.

Trevor earned Oscar nominations for Dead End, a 1937 melodrama in which she played a good girl who grows up to be a prostitute, and for The High and the Mighty, a 1954 airplane-in-trouble epic.

She was also in John Ford's 1939 classic Stagecoach, playing a frontier prostitute redeemed by a gallant John Wayne.

In an interview with the Chicago Tribune in 1987, Trevor was reluctant to name a personal favorite among her films but singled out two she said "were the most fun to make."

"Stagecoach, because John Ford was marvelous. And Key Largo because everyone in the cast was interesting or exciting or different," she recalled. "I could have stayed on that picture for the rest of my life. I adored it."

Trevor became a close friend of Wayne's and a neighbor in Newport Beach, a wealthy enclave about 45 miles southeast of Los Angeles.

"He was bigger than life, and he was as warm as the earth and as generous as Croesus," she said.

In Key Largo, Trevor played ex-singer Gaye Dawn, mistress of sadistic gangster Edward G. Robinson. In one scene, he forces her to sing Moanin' Low to get a badly craved drink. Trevor gamely makes it through the song only to be refused the drink by Robinson "because you were rotten."

In the 1950s, she appeared in a number of television dramas and won a 1956 Emmy Award for her performance in Dodsworth on NBC's Producers Showcase.

Her last feature film was Kiss Me Goodbye in 1982. She played Sally Field's poker-playing mother.

In 1987, she appeared in the television movie Breaking Home Ties as a teacher who helps a high school boy in the 1950s.

She was born Claire Wemlinger in New York. When her father, a Fifth Avenue clothier, lost his business during the Depression, she went to work to help out the family.

She had been in school plays and studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.

"The only thing I knew how to do was act," she recalled. "And at that point, I didn't even know much about that."

But the stage-struck beauty made her Broadway debut in 1932 and shot some film shorts in Brooklyn at the Vitagraph studio. The following year she made her feature film debut in Life in the Raw, and soon was a contract player in B movies.

Typically, suc films were shot in 18 days.

"You'd work until 2 or 3 in the morning," she recalled.

She became known as "The Queen of the B's." In 1936 alone, she appeared in eight films.

In a 1995 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Trevor remained supportive of the old studio system.

"You had to do a lot of work that you didn't want to do; that's true - a lot of crummy pictures," she said. "But they knew how to build a star, and they knew what to do with you. They also taught you everything."

Trevor was critical of the new Hollywood, saying it had "lost an enormous amount of quality.

"I mean, everyone wants violence. If you don't have something violent in the picture, it's considered no good."

Trevor married producer Clark Andrews in 1938 and they divorced four years later. A second marriage to Cylos William Dunsmoore produced a son, Charles.

They divorced in 1947 and she married producer Milton Bren in 1948. His two sons from a previous marriage, Peter and Donald Bren, and her son, Charles, lived with the newlyweds.

"We were an instant family," Trevor told the Times. "I raised both of his boys. They're like my own."

Charles died in an airliner crash in 1978. Milton died of a brain tumor in 1979. Stepson Donald became a billionaire real estate developer.

"Claire was a special woman whose lifelong passion was to bring joy to others," Donald Bren said in a statement. "Her legacy will be the many ways she touched people.

"We will all miss her. She was a great lady."

Funeral services will be private, and a memorial service was being planned.

By Bob Thomas
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