Josephine Dunn

Mary Josephine Dunn was born on May 1, 1906, in New York City and died on February 3, 1983, in Thousand Oaks, California, at the age of 76. Educated at Holy Cross convent school, she pursued a career as a stage and film actress that spanned the 1920s and 1930s.

Dunn entered the entertainment industry at age 14, joining the chorus at the Winter Garden Theatre. Standing 5 feet 5 inches tall with blonde hair, she made her first stage appearance in the chorus of Good Morning Dearie. Rather than return to school, she continued building a Broadway career that ran from 1924 to 1934 and encompassed nearly 20 productions, among them the Ziegfeld Follies and Kid Boots. Her verified Broadway credits include the musical Dear Sir in 1924, the play Mr. Pickwick in 1927, the musical Take a Chance in 1932, and the play Between Two Worlds in 1934.

In 1926, Dunn visited Paramount Pictures with a friend and was discovered there, leading to her enrollment in the Paramount Pictures School. Her film debut came that same year in Fascinating Youth, a production cast from the school's graduating class. She subsequently took lead roles in Love's Greatest Mistake and Fireman, Save My Child, both released in 1927. Following nine months without film work, she signed a long-term contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Dunn appeared in 23 silent films in total, and in 1929 she was named one of 13 WAMPAS Baby Stars, an honor she shared that year with actress Jean Arthur. In 1930 she successfully transitioned to sound films, starring in Safety in Numbers alongside Carole Lombard and Kathryn Crawford, and continued making films through 1932, accumulating sixteen sound film credits.

Dunn married four times. Her first marriage, to contracting engineer William P. Cameron, took place in Elkton, Maryland, in 1925 and ended in divorce in 1928. On January 10, 1931, in Los Angeles, she married Clyde Greathouse, an oil company official; that marriage ended on October 26, 1931. On January 6, 1933, in Great Neck, New York, she married Eugene J. Lewis, from whom she was divorced in 1935. Her fourth husband was Carroll Case, whose father Frank Case owned the Algonquin Hotel in New York City, the home of the Algonquin Round Table. Dunn retired from acting in 1938 and remained with Case until his death in 1978. She died of cancer in 1983.