Dorothy Burgess

Dorothy Burgess (March 4, 1907 – August 20, 1961) was an American actress who worked in both stage and motion pictures. Born in Los Angeles, she was the niece of actress Fay Bainter and, on her father's side, was related to David C. Montgomery of the comedy duo Montgomery and Stone. Her grandfather, Henry A. Burgess Sr., was born in England and relocated to Los Angeles in 1893, where he established a business at Terminal Island. Her father, H.A. Burgess, spent a decade as an assistant to Harris M. Hanshue, the founder and first president of Western Air Express, later known as Western Airlines. Burgess pursued studies in drawing, painting, and sculpture at Mrs. Dow's School in Briarcliff Manor, New York, and the objects she created in those disciplines were displayed in her Hollywood apartment.

Burgess began her stage career in a walk-on role alongside her aunt Bainter and subsequently appeared as a specialty dancer in The Music Box Revue. In September 1924, she joined the Broadway production of Dancing Mothers, in which her mother Grace also had a featured role. Burgess initially performed in a cabaret scene and served as understudy to Helen Hayes in one of the principal roles. When Hayes departed for Quarantine in November 1924, Burgess was elevated to that leading part. Her verified Broadway credits span 1926 to 1927 and include the play The Adorable Liar, staged at the 49th Street Theater in August 1926, in which she played a seventeen-year-old; the musical Bye, Bye, Bonnie; and the play Synthetic Sin. She also appeared on Broadway in The Squall and played the title role in Lulu Belle, for which she received star billing from producer David Belasco. During the summer of 1928, Burgess was co-featured in a stock company managed by George Cukor and George H. Kondolf at the Lyceum Theatre in Rochester, New York, with Henry Hull as her co-star.

Fox Film brought Burgess to the screen in In Old Arizona (1928), one of the first outdoor talking pictures and the first film made with the Movietone sound system. She portrayed a Mexican character pursued by both Edmund Lowe and Warner Baxter. The role established a pattern: Burgess was frequently cast as Spanish or Mexican women throughout her career, including in The Broken Wing, a Paul Dickerson romantic comedy staged at El Capitan Theater in Los Angeles in July 1931, where she depicted a Mexican girl. She later reprised the archetype of a dance-hall girl in The Lone Star Ranger (1942), produced by 20th Century-Fox, echoing her work in In Old Arizona.

Among her other film appearances, Burgess won the feminine lead in Beyond Victory (1931) after Ann Harding declined the role, with William Boyd starring opposite her in the Pathé Pictures release. In December 1931 she signed with First National Pictures for a significant role in Play Girl (1932), based on a screen story by Maude Fulton and produced jointly by Warner Bros. and First National. She appeared as a romantic rival to Jean Harlow in Hold Your Man (1932), which also starred Clark Gable. Additional credits include Swing High (1930), Taxi! (1932), Ladies They Talk About (1933), Strictly Personal (1933), Headline Shooter (1933), Night Flight (1933), Black Moon (1934), and Miss Fane's Baby Is Stolen (1934). She acted alongside Edmund Lowe and Nancy Carroll in the Paramount Pictures release I Love That Man (1933), directed by Harry Joe Brown and produced by Charles R. Rogers. Burgess appeared with Richard Barthelmess and Jean Muir in A Modern Hero (1934), a film centered on a young circus rider, and played the role of Dorothy Kane in Gambling (1934), starring George M. Cohan and produced by Harold B. Franklin at Eastern Services Studios in Astoria, Queens.

In May 1929, two large lamps mounted on a tripod fell on a sound stage at the Fox Movietone Studio while Burgess was working. One of the incandescent lamps cut her severely above her left eye, and she was taken to a studio hospital where the wound required several stitches. In July 1933, she strained ligaments in her back and shoulders while filming fight scenes with Mary Carlisle and Sally O'Neil at Universal Pictures.

Burgess became engaged to film director Clarence Brown in 1932 and was later involved in a romance with New York jeweler Jules Galenzer in 1934. On the night of December 23, 1932, she was involved in an automobile accident in San Francisco in which seventeen-year-old Louise Manfredi died. Burgess collided with a car driven by eighteen-year-old Andrew Salz, a University of California–Berkeley student, and each driver attributed responsibility to the other. Burgess suffered from shock and was placed in a San Francisco sanitarium. Her bail was set at fifty dollars and her hearing was postponed. In January 1933, Manfredi's parents, Italo and Marie Manfredi, filed suit seeking twenty-five thousand dollars in damages; the San Francisco Superior Court approved a compromise payment of six thousand one hundred fifty dollars in August 1933. A separate compromise of six thousand dollars was reached for damages claimed by eighteen-year-old Betty Lou Davis, who was also injured in the accident.

In May 1961, Burgess was hospitalized while living in Palm Springs, California. She died of lung cancer on August 20, 1961, at the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, at the age of fifty-four. Her remains are held in vaultage at Chapel of the Pines Crematory in Los Angeles.