Carroll McComas

Carroll McComas (June 27, 1886 – November 9, 1962) was an American actress whose career spanned stage, film, and television across more than five decades. Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico Territory, she was the daughter of Judge Charles Carroll McComas and his wife, Ellen Moore, and counted Charles Carroll of Carrollton among her ancestors.

McComas made her stage debut in 1907, beginning with a whistling act performed over a single weekend at the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles before returning to school after the first Monday matinee. She subsequently built a vaudeville career as a dancer, singer, and whistler, with whistling as her particular specialty. Her performances as a whistler took her to London and on a tour of South Africa before she transitioned to dramatic work.

Her Broadway career ran from 1904 to 1950 and encompassed more than two dozen roles. In 1918 she appeared in the Princess Theatre musical Oh, Lady! Lady!!, the Jerome Kern, Guy Bolton, and P. G. Wodehouse production in which she played May Barber. Among her most celebrated stage achievements were the title role in Zona Gale's Miss Lulu Bett during the 1920–21 season and the role of Roxane in Cyrano de Bergerac during the 1923–24 season. Her Broadway credits also included Madame X, Design for a Stained Glass Window, Night Hawk, Pyramids, and You Can't Win, the last of which dates to 1926. She concluded her Broadway career in 1950 playing Catherine Petkoff in Arms and the Man.

McComas entered film with the silent picture When Love Is King in 1916, a film that survives to the present day. Her second silent film, Jack Straw, followed in 1920 and also remains extant. After a lengthy absence from the screen, she returned to film in 1953 to take a supporting role in Jamaica Run, appearing as the mother of Wendell Corey and Arlene Dahl. She also appeared in Chicago Syndicate in 1955 and in The Miracle Worker, and extended her work to television as well.

In 1922, McComas married cartoonist Walter Enright; the marriage ended in divorce in 1928. She married Selskar M. Gunn, a vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation, in 1933, and interrupted her acting career following that union. Gunn died in 1944, after which McComas resumed her stage work in 1950 and her film work in 1953. She died on November 9, 1962, at her home in New York City at the age of 76.