Mae Clarke

Mae Clarke, born Violet Mary Klotz on August 16, 1910, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was an American actress whose career spanned stage, film, and television across five decades. Her father worked as a theatre organist, and Clarke began studying dance as a child before entering vaudeville and performing in nightclubs. In 1922, at age twelve, she participated in the Miss America Pageant Parade on the Atlantic City Boardwalk, dressed as a lobster. She returned to that same Boardwalk Parade in 1940 as a featured guest, riding in a white convertible limousine.

Clarke launched her professional career as a dancer in New York City, where she shared living quarters with Barbara Stanwyck. Her Broadway work came between 1926 and 1927, during which she appeared in the play The Noose and the musical Manhattan Mary. From the stage she transitioned to film, becoming a contract player whose work in 1931 alone produced several of her most enduring screen appearances.

That year, Clarke appeared in three films that cemented her place in cinema history. In Frankenstein, produced by Universal Studios, she played Elizabeth, the fiancée of Henry Frankenstein, who is attacked by the Monster, portrayed by Boris Karloff, on her wedding day. Also in 1931, she appeared in The Public Enemy alongside James Cagney, in a scene in which Cagney presses half a grapefruit into her face — a moment that became one of the most frequently referenced and parodied in film history. The picture proved so popular that a Times Square theatre screened it around the clock upon its release. Clarke's former husband, Lew Brice — brother of comedian Fanny Brice — was reported by The Hollywood Reporter to have seen the film more than twenty times specifically to watch that scene. Clarke's third major 1931 release was the pre-Code Universal production The Front Page, the original screen adaptation of the stage play.

Also that year, Clarke portrayed Myra Deauville in Waterloo Bridge, a pre-Code Universal film in which her character, a young American woman, is driven by circumstance into prostitution in World War I London. Critics responded favorably to both the film and her performance. In 1932 she appeared in Night World alongside Lew Ayres, Boris Karloff, Hedda Hopper, and George Raft. The following year, 1933, brought two additional notable credits: Fast Workers, the final MGM film John Gilbert made under his studio contract, in which Clarke played the female lead, and Lady Killer, again opposite James Cagney, with Margaret Lindsay. That same year, Clarke and actor Phillips Holmes were involved in a single-car accident that left her with a broken jaw and facial scarring, though the injuries did not end her standing as a leading lady.

Through most of the 1930s Clarke continued working as a lead actress, though the productions she was cast in gradually carried smaller budgets and less prestige than her earlier films. By 1940 she had moved predominantly into supporting roles, with occasional leading parts later in the decade, including the heroine in the 1949 Republic serial King of the Rocket Men. During the 1950s and 1960s she appeared in uncredited bit parts in several prominent films, among them Singin' in the Rain, The Great Caruso, and Thoroughly Modern Millie. On television she had roles in episodic series including Perry Mason, Batman, and General Hospital. Her final screen appearance came in the 1970 film Watermelon Man, after which she retired from performing and taught drama.

Clarke was married and divorced three times — to Lew Brice, Stevens Bancroft, and Herbert Langdon — and had no children. In her later years she lived at the Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California. She died of cancer on April 29, 1992, at the age of 81, and is buried at Valhalla Memorial Park Cemetery.