Minna Gombel

Minna Marie Gombel was born on May 28, 1892, in Baltimore, Maryland, to William Gombel, a medical doctor who had emigrated from Germany in 1880, and Emma M. Debring Gombel, a Baltimore native of German descent. Gombel went on to become an American stage and film actress whose career spanned several decades and encompassed both Broadway productions and Hollywood films.

Gombel began her stage career in 1912, performing under the name Winifred Lee. She built her early experience in stock theater, working with troupes in cities including Albany, Atlanta, Cleveland, New Orleans, and Los Angeles. Her Broadway career ran from 1913 to 1930 and included a substantial list of productions. Among her earliest credits were My Lady's Garter in 1915, followed by The Indestructible Wife and Six Months' Option, both in 1917, and On the Hiring Line in 1919. She continued to appear on Broadway through the 1920s in productions including Listening In in 1922, Mr. Pitt in 1923, Alloy in 1924, Ballyhoo in 1926, and both The Great Power and Indiscretions in 1928.

In the late 1920s, Gombel was signed by the Fox Film Corporation. Her first film, Doctors' Wives, was released in 1931, in which she appeared under the name Nancy Gardner, a name assigned to her by Fox. Following that film, she spent a period coaching young actresses before returning to the screen under her own name. Over the course of her Hollywood career she appeared in approximately fifty films, among them The Thin Man, The Merry Widow, Boom Town, High Sierra, Block-Heads, Hoop-La, The First Year, Doomed Caravan, and The Best Years of Our Lives.

In her personal life, Gombel married Howard Chesham Rumsey in New York City on March 9, 1916; the couple divorced in 1921. In 1922 she entered a secret marriage with aviator and press agent Ferdinand Eggena in Atlanta, Georgia. The marriage became public when Eggena was arrested for fraud in November of that year. Gombel filed for divorce shortly thereafter, and it was granted in 1924. On May 19, 1933, she married millionaire banker Joseph W. Sefton Jr. They separated in 1947 and divorced in 1954. Some sources have identified writer and producer Myron C. Fagan, who was involved in several of her stage and film projects during the 1920s, as a husband, though Fagan was married to another woman during that period, a woman who died in 1966.

Gombel died in Santa Monica on April 14, 1973, and was buried at Loudon Park Cemetery in Baltimore, Maryland.