Dagmar Oakland

Dagmar Oakland, born Edna Martine Dagmar Andersen on August 21, 1897, in San Francisco, California, was an American actress whose career spanned stage, vaudeville, and film. She died on October 8, 1989. Her parents, Edward Andersen and Anna Marthine Olsen, were both from Norway, with her father having emigrated from Fredrikstad. Oakland had three siblings: Edward, Herbert, and Vivien. Following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, her mother, by then a widow since 1898, relocated the family to Oakland, California, where both Dagmar and her sister Vivien adopted Oakland as their professional surname in honor of their new hometown. Vivien would go on to her own career on Broadway and in motion pictures as Vivien Oakland.

Before establishing herself as a solo performer, Oakland worked alongside her sister in vaudeville. The two appeared together as the Anker sisters, drawing on an old family name, and later performed as the Oakland Sisters as part of the Boston Juveniles, a vaudeville group that traveled the west coast as far north as Seattle, Washington. Their vaudeville work eventually brought them to New York City, where both sisters appeared with the Ziegfeld Follies. Oakland was a member of that company on two separate occasions. In 1915, she transitioned to a solo stage career.

Oakland's Broadway career extended from 1917 to 1931 and included appearances in both musicals and plays. Her credits encompassed the musical Cinders, the play One Kiss, the musical The Student Prince, the play The Pearl of Great Price, and the play The Wonder Bar, among additional productions. In November 1924, she took on a significant role in Heidelberg, the musical adaptation of a play previously made famous by Richard Mansfield.

Her personal life intersected with her stage work when, in 1917, while performing in a Broadway production, she met Captain Garnette Rotan, a World War I veteran who later wrote theatre criticism under the pen name Pierre de Rohan. The two married in 1919 and divorced in 1925. Oakland subsequently became engaged to English actor Thomas Oliver Neville Clark, though the relationship ended when Clark was deported from the United States in June 1935 for overstaying his visitor's permit.

Beginning in 1930, Oakland pursued a career in Hollywood. Her first feature film was The Heart Breaker, directed by Edmund Joseph, in which she appeared alongside Joan Blondell, Gloria Shea, and Walter Kinsella. She played a reporter in Wedding Present in 1936 and a nurse in Hit Parade of 1937. Her film work continued into the late 1940s, including uncredited appearances in Tonight and Every Night and Thrill of a Romance, both in 1945, and Riverboat Rhythm in 1946.