When it comes to the great screwball comedies of the ’30s and ’40s, several names come to mind instantly, like Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Myrna Loy, and Jimmy Stewart. But one name consistently rises above the rest: Irene Dunne. She didn’t have the illustrious career of Hepburn, or the signature role of Loy. She never won an Academy Award (which many modern-day critics consider a huge oversight). In fact, her road to comedy stardom was hardly a straightforward one, and her initial hope in life was to become an opera singer.
Luckily for viewing audiences, her voice was deemed not quite up to snuff by the Metropolitan Opera Company (although it was quite competent enough to sing in a number of her films). Here’s a quick look at how she became a mainstay of a genre characterized by humorous battles of the sexes that often verged into the ridiculous, with quirky heroines trading witty barbs with their male counterparts.
Humble Beginnings
Irene Dunne (who changed her name early in her career from the original Dunn) was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and her humble beginnings in showbiz began innocuously enough in school, being taught piano by her mother and appearing in church and high school productions. After her father’s death, the family moved to Indiana, where Dunne aimed to pursue a career in music education at the Indianapolis Conservatory of Music. Her dreams shifted to the Chicago Musical College and an opera career, and although the opera fell through, luckily for the world, she stumbled into the world of musical theater instead.
Although she was a Broadway regular for nearly a decade, and snagged some starring roles, she was 30 by the time she made her first film, Leathernecking, in 1930, not exactly an auspicious time to begin one’s film career in an age of dewy young ingénues. To keep up with the competition, she (with the help of publicists) started shaving a few years off her birth date. Along with a few musicals, Dunne garnered attention for her appearance in the western Cimarron, for which she was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, followed by a string of melodramatic tearjerkers, including Back Street, No Other Woman, and as a woman who tragically loses her sight in Magnificent Obsession.
She was initially reluctant to venture into comedy, but her initial foray, Theodora Goes Wild (1936), paired her with Melvyn Douglas and got her a second Best Actress nomination. Dunne played Theodora, a prim Sunday School teacher in a conservative small town who has, unbeknownst to her family and fellow residents, written a scandalous, best-selling romance that has horrified the whole town. Douglas is her romantic foil as a rakish New York book illustrator who comes to town determined to force Theodora into being her true self. She eventually does, but the tables are turned in predictably screwball fashion when she follows him back to New York City and similarly upends his life. Screwball comedy had found its newest star.
Co-Starring with Cary
Perhaps her most successful were three comedies with the incomparable Cary Grant, starting with the 1937 classic The Awful Truth, which was named number 68 on the AFI’s list of Top 100 funniest movies in American cinema. Dunne is simply effervescent as Lucy Warriner, and she and Cary Grant begin the film as a husband and wife so suspicious of each other’s behavior that they decide to divorce. They spend the rest of the movie working out how to win each other back, resulting in a series of wild hijinks involving unsuitable prospective partners and their dog Mr. Smith. Leo McCarey won Best Director; the film was inducted into the National Film Registry, and for Dunne it meant another Best Actress nomination.
Three years later came My Favorite Wife, in which Dunne and Grant once again played a married couple, although Dunne’s character returns after having been shipwrecked for several years and declared legally dead. Add Grant’s new flame and the handsome man with whom Dunne was stranded, and you’ve got a quasi-sequel to The Awful Truth that even Pauline Kael enjoyed.
The third Dunne/Grant outing was Penny Serenade. This one was not a straight comedy, but the pair once again play a married couple. Their relationship is played out in flashback using cues from the popular music of each phase of their lives together. After losing a pregnancy, they adopt a child, and we see their relationship go through some rather melodramatic struggles until, inevitably, they are back together at the end.
Another Famous Pairing
Dunne had another famous trio of films in which she co-starred with Charles Boyer, Love Affair, When Tomorrow Comes, and Together Again, although these were more in the genre of romance. Love Affair (another Best Actress nomination for Dunne) in particular was a huge success, directed by Dunne’s The Awful Truth collaborator Leo McCarey, although its popularity didn’t last: it spawned a number of incredibly successful remakes, including the classic An Affair to Remember, starring Cary Grant opposite Deborah Kerr.
Dunne had one more big hit with I Remember Mama, a family drama which earned her her fifth and final Academy Award nomination. In the following years it became apparent her star was on the wane, which Dunne took as a sign to withdraw from Hollywood before things got even harder. She had made her last film by 1952, spent her later years as an avid humanitarian activist, working with numerous charities, and even becoming an American delegate to the United Nations.
But for a few years in the 1930s, Irene Dunne lit up the screwball comedies of the silver screen. It’s unfortunate that she never won an Academy Award despite numerous well-deserved nominations, but hopefully her name will not be lost to cinema history, and future audiences will discover and enjoy her sparkling performances.
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