Dorothy Dunbar

Dorothy Dunbar Lawson, born May 28, 1902, in Colorado Springs, Colorado, was an American actress and socialite who built a career spanning Broadway and silent film before retiring from the screen in the late 1920s. She died on October 23, 1992, in Seattle, Washington, at the age of 90.

Dunbar began performing at an early age, appearing on the Broadway stage as a child in the 1904 musical The School Girl, a credit she earned despite her father's opposition to her pursuing acting. Her path to a professional career in film came two decades later when she traveled to Hollywood in 1924, making her screen debut in the Western The Flaming Crisis, in which she played a character named Tex Miller for Mesco Productions.

Her film work accelerated through 1926 and 1927, during which she appeared in a range of productions for Film Booking Offices of America and other studios. Among her most prominent roles was that of Lady Cleone Meredith in The Amateur Gentleman (1926), a drama-romance produced by First National Pictures in which she starred opposite Richard Barthelmess. That performance drew considerable notice. Also in 1927, while under contract to Film Booking Offices of America at $150 per week, she became the fourth actress to portray Jane in a Tarzan film, playing Lady Greystoke in Tarzan and the Golden Lion opposite James Pierce in the title role. Her other screen credits from this period include The Masquerade Bandit (1926), Breed of the Sea (1926), Red Hot Hoofs (1926), Lightning Lariats (1927), When a Dog Loves (1927), and What Price Love? (1927).

During her film career, Dunbar declined a contract offer from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer that would have placed her in the lead female role opposite John Gilbert, choosing instead to pursue a long-term arrangement with a newly formed British film company. That company's studio subsequently burned down and was never reopened. She continued working in Westerns for poverty row studios before retiring from film entirely prior to the advent of sound pictures.

Dunbar was married six times before her final marriage. Her husbands included a theatrical producer named Maurice, from whom she was divorced; Thomas Bucklin Wells II, a wealthy Minneapolis society man whom she married in October 1926 and who appeared in the 1927 Film Booking Offices of America release Ain't Love Funny?; French Embassy attaché Jaime De Garson, whom she married in London and divorced in 1931; boxer and actor Max Baer, whom she married on July 8, 1931, and divorced in 1933; portrait painter Tino Costa, whom she married in 1936 and from whom she sought an annulment in 1937, citing his temperament; and Russell Lawson, her seventh and final husband, after whom she styled herself Dorothy Wells Lawson. With Lawson she had two sons, Richard and Russell.

The circumstances surrounding the death of Thomas Wells were notable. While Dunbar was preparing to divorce him, she received word that he was dying in Paris. She traveled to his bedside, where he died in her arms, having succumbed to drug addiction. She subsequently received a monthly income of $2,500 from his estate. In December 1937, she filed suit against members of the Wells family seeking $270,000 in trusts from his estate, alleging that family members had misrepresented documents she signed after his death as instruments to protect her interests, when they were in fact waivers of her claims to those trusts.

By 1936, Dunbar had completed a book of poetry but had not submitted it to a publisher. She had by that point long considered her film career to be behind her. Following her marriage to Lawson, she pursued interests including bridge and golf, winning trophies in both. Her memorial service after her death in 1992 was held privately by her family.