Dennie Moore

Dennie Moore, born Florence Moore on December 30, 1902, in New York City, was an American stage and film actress whose Broadway career spanned from 1927 to 1955. Raised in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, she was the daughter of immigrant parents of Scottish and Irish descent. Her brother, Joe Moore, was an Olympic champion speed skater. She had two step-sisters and one step-brother, and received six years of formal schooling.

Moore adopted the professional name Dennie Moore in the late 1920s to distinguish herself from another actress named Florence Moore. Her stage career began on Broadway in 1927, and over the following decades she appeared in numerous productions, including A Lady in Love, The Trial of Mary Dugan, Torch Song, Man Bites Dog, In Clover, Cross Roads, Twentieth Century, Phantoms, Conflict, Anatol, and Jarnegan, among others. Beyond New York, she also performed in productions in Chicago, Illinois and London, England.

In 1935, Moore relocated to Hollywood and made her screen debut in an uncredited but substantial role in Sylvia Scarlett, the RKO Radio Pictures film starring Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. Working primarily as a freelance actress, she moved between Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Warner Bros., accumulating twenty-two film appearances between 1935 and 1951. Her film credits include Boy Meets Girl (1938), The Women (1939), Saturday's Children (1940), Dive Bomber (1941), and Anna Lucasta (1949). Her final screen appearance came in 1951, when she played Mrs. Bea Gingras in The Model and the Marriage Broker.

As film work diminished in the mid-1940s, Moore returned increasingly to the New York stage. Her last theatrical credit was the role of Mrs. Van Daan in The Diary of Anne Frank, a part she originated. She retired from acting in 1957 at the age of 55. Moore died of natural causes in her Manhattan apartment on February 22, 1978, at the age of 75, leaving no immediate survivors. She was cremated and her ashes were scattered from her balcony.