Nora Dunfee

Marjorie Dean Dunfee, known professionally as Nora Dunfee, was an American actress, dialect specialist, and acting coach born on December 25, 1915, in Belmont, Ohio. She died on December 23, 1994, at St. Clare's Hospital and Health Center in Manhattan, following complications from a brief illness.

Dunfee launched her professional acting career at the Ogunquit Playhouse in Ogunquit, Maine, where she appeared in Sinclair Lewis's production of Our Town. Her stage work spanned several decades and included both Broadway and off-Broadway productions. Her verified Broadway credit is Madam, Will You Walk? in 1953, and her broader stage credits encompass The Midnight Caller (1958), The Visit (1960), The Last Days of Lincoln (1961), and Crowbar (1990). She also appeared on film, with a notable role as the elderly woman at the bus stop who offers advice to Tom Hanks's character in Forrest Gump.

Following World War II, Dunfee studied at the Actors Laboratory Theater in Los Angeles, where her engagement with dialect and phonetics shaped the direction of her subsequent career. She studied speech and voice under Margaret Prendergast McLean and went on to teach for many years in the graduate acting program at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. In the early 1960s, she operated the Nora Dunfee Studio in New York and also taught privately in both New York and California. Among the actors she coached were Julie Haydon, James Earl Jones, Raul Julia, Diane Keaton, Mel Gibson, and Keanu Reeves.

As a vocal and dialect consultant for theater, Dunfee worked on The Real Thing, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and A Lie of the Mind. Her film dialect coaching credits include Witness, Crimes of the Heart, and The Serpent and the Rainbow. Her final professional engagement was on the film Rob Roy (1995), where she was serving as Sissy Spacek's dialogue coach and preparing for her own role in Charles Matthau's adaptation of Truman Capote's The Grass Harp when illness forced her to leave the production.

Dunfee met her husband, actor David Clarke, in an acting class, and the two married in 1946. They appeared together on stage in Portrait of a Lady, The Visit, and The Gin Game. The couple had two daughters, K.C. and Susan.