Ina Claire

Ina Claire, born Ina Fagan on October 15, 1893, in Washington, D.C., was an American stage and film actress whose Broadway career spanned from 1910 to 1954. After her father's death, she and her mother, Cora, and brother, Allen, lived in a boarding house, where she began performing imitations of fellow residents. Her mother withdrew her from school in the eighth grade, and Claire adopted her mother's maiden name as she launched her career in vaudeville. As early as 1906, she appeared in a recitation as the grand finale of a program presented by Miss Cora B. Shreve's pupils in Washington, D.C., where a newspaper identified her as Ina Claire Fagan.

Claire made her professional stage debut in October 1907 in Elmira, New York, playing Florie in The Fatal Flower under a two-year contract. By 1909, she had developed a vaudeville act called "Dainty Mimic," which featured an imitation of actor Harry Lauder. A booking agent described the act as one of the best single acts he had seen that season, noting her magnetism and the strong response she drew from audiences. She transitioned to Broadway musicals with appearances in Jumping Jupiter and The Quaker Girl, both in 1911, followed by Lady Luxury in 1914 and 1915. She also appeared in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1915 and 1916, and made her film debut in Cecil B. DeMille's The Wild Goose Chase in 1915.

Through the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, Claire established herself as a leading interpreter of high comedy on Broadway, taking on roles written by prominent comic dramatists of the era. She played Jerry Lamarr in Avery Hopwood's The Gold Diggers in 1919, Mrs. Cheyney in Frederick Lonsdale's The Last of Mrs. Cheyney in 1925, and Lady George Grayston in W. Somerset Maugham's Our Betters in 1928. She became particularly associated with the work of playwright S. N. Behrman, originating the female leads in three of his productions: Biography in 1934, End of Summer in 1936, and The Talley Method in 1941. Critic J. Brooks Atkinson praised her for her refulgent comic intelligence, while Behrman himself wrote that her readings were translucent, her stage presence encompassing, and that she never missed a nuance.

Claire spent approximately five years away from the stage in the early 1940s, living with her husband in San Francisco, before returning to Broadway in George Kelly's The Fatal Weakness, in which she played Enid Fuller. Her final stage appearance came in 1954, when she portrayed Lady Elizabeth Mulhammer in T. S. Eliot's The Confidential Clerk. On screen, she is perhaps best remembered for her portrayal of the Grand Duchess Swana in the 1939 romantic comedy Ninotchka, directed by Ernst Lubitsch and starring Greta Garbo. Claire was an inductee in the American Theater Hall of Fame and holds a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She died on February 21, 1985, in San Francisco, California, following a heart attack, at the age of 91, and is buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Salt Lake City.