Dorothy Comingore

Dorothy Comingore, born Margaret Louise Comingore on August 24, 1913, in Los Angeles, was an American stage and film actress who worked under multiple professional names across her career. She spent much of her childhood in Oakland, California, and was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied philosophy. Her father, William Paxton Comingore, worked as an electrotyper and union organizer, an influence that shaped her political outlook. Her older sister Lucille ran a nightclub in San Francisco.

Comingore began her performing career in stage and radio work under the name Kay Winters before transitioning to film, where she was initially billed as Linda Winters. After a period living in Taos, New Mexico, she returned to California to pursue theater work. In March 1938, while performing at a small playhouse in Carmel alongside Robert Meltzer, she was noticed by Charles Chaplin, who encouraged both of them to move to Hollywood. Comingore later downplayed the significance of that encounter, telling the Oakland Tribune in April 1938 that press accounts had overstated her contact with Chaplin. Nevertheless, the experience prompted her to pursue film acting more seriously. Through a contact at the Carmel theater, she secured a Hollywood agent, obtained a screen test, and signed a contract with Warner Bros., where she took on mostly small and uncredited parts in B-pictures.

Her career changed substantially when Orson Welles cast her, now performing under her birth surname Dorothy Comingore, as Susan Alexander Kane in his debut feature Citizen Kane in 1941. The role of the second wife of press tycoon Charles Foster Kane brought her widespread critical attention. The Los Angeles Times described her as an important acquisition for pictures, and the Hollywood Reporter predicted the film would make her a star. Despite this recognition, her momentum stalled when her new studio, RKO Pictures, denied her loanout requests from other studios. She fell ill, was placed on bed rest, and was subsequently suspended by RKO. During this period, newspapers controlled by William Randolph Hearst — whose mistress Marion Davies was widely understood to be the basis for Susan Alexander — began publishing accusations that Comingore held Communist sympathies, placing her on a government watch list. Her political activities, which included canvassing for actor and State Assembly candidate Albert Dekker, working with Lead Belly and Paul Robeson to desegregate whites-only USO clubs, co-sponsoring the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee, and promoting union causes, contributed to an FBI file described as thick.

She appeared in the 1944 film adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape alongside William Bendix, Susan Hayward, and John Loder, and in 1945 she appeared on Broadway in Beggars Are Coming to Town. Her final film credit was a supporting role in The Big Night in 1951. According to filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich, Comingore also declined several roles she found uninteresting in the years following Citizen Kane, including parts in Unexpected Uncle and Valley of the Sun, which triggered her RKO suspension, and a lead role in what became The Big Street, made in 1942 with Lucille Ball.

Her career came to an effective end in 1951 as a result of the Hollywood blacklist. The following year she was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee regarding her alleged Communist Party connections and chose to be an unfriendly witness, declining on constitutional grounds to answer questions or identify colleagues. In March 1953 she was arrested in West Hollywood on a solicitation charge, an arrest she publicly characterized as connected to her status as an unfriendly witness. The charge was dropped on the condition that she be committed to Camarillo State Mental Hospital, where she remained institutionalized for approximately two years. She never returned to acting on stage or screen.

In her personal life, Comingore was briefly married in the late 1930s to actor and writer Robert Meltzer. She subsequently married screenwriter Richard Collins, with whom she had two children before their divorce in 1946. Collins, a former Communist Party member who cooperated with HUAC and named more than twenty colleagues, won custody of their children, with Comingore's political associations and accusations of heavy drinking used against her in the proceedings. She later married screenwriter Theodore Strauss, with whom she had one child, and subsequently John W. Crowe, a rural postal carrier and owner of a small store called the Crowe's Nest in Lords Point, Connecticut. She met Crowe in 1957 and remained with him until her death. In her final years, Comingore lived in seclusion in a seaside home in Connecticut, her activities limited by arthritis and declining health. Alcohol abuse was believed to have contributed to her deteriorating condition.

In the 1960s, Professor Howard Suber of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television interviewed Comingore as part of his research into the history of the Citizen Kane screenplay. That research was later drawn upon by critic Pauline Kael for her 1971 essay Raising Kane. A recording of the Comingore interview is held in the Lilly Library collection at Indiana University Bloomington.

Comingore died of pulmonary disease on December 30, 1971, in Stonington, Connecticut, at the age of 58. Her ashes were scattered across multiple locations. As of 2021, no monument or plaque had been erected to mark her death.