Profile of Claire Trevor on Famous Like Me

Claire Trevor (1910-2000)

Nicknamed "Queen of Film Noir" because of her many appearances in "bad girl” roles in film noir and other black-and-white thrillers, Claire Trevor appeared in over 60 films. Trevor was born Claire Wemlinger, of Irish and French extraction, on March 8, 1910 in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, New York, the only child of a 5th Avenue merchant-tailor and his wife.

Claire Trevor's acting career spanned more than seven decades and included success in stage, radio, television and film. Trevor often played the hard-boiled blond, and every conceivable type of "bad girl" role. After attending American Academy of Dramatic Arts, she began her acting career in the late '20s in stock. By 1932 she was starring on Broadway; that same year she began appearing in Brooklyn-filmed Vitaphone shorts. Her feature film debut came in: Jimmy and Sally (1933) as "Sally Johnson".

A three-time Oscar nominee, Claire Trevor earned Oscar nominations for Dead End, a 1937 melodrama in which she played a good girl who grows up to be a prostitute, and for The High and the Mighty, a 1954 airplane disaster epic. She won the Best Supporting Actress award for her 1948 performance in Key Largo, co-starring with Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson and Lauren Bacall. In Key Largo, Trevor played the mistress to Robinson's sadistic gangster. In one scene, he forces her to sing for a drink she badly wants. Trevor struggles through the song only to be refused the drink by Robinson "because you were rotten."

In 1956, Trevor won an Emmy for Best Live Television Performance by an Actress for Dodsworth, with Fredric March, on NBC's Producer's Showcase. A theatre at the University of California is named in Trevor's honor.

In 1978 her only biological child, her son Charles Dunsmoore, died in an airliner crash and her last husband, Milton Bren, died from a brain tumor in 1979. Trevor retired from acting in 1987. She died of respiratory failure in Newport Beach, April 8, 2000 at the age of 90, survived by several wealthy step-children by her marriage to Bren.

Claire Trevor has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Marriages

• She married film producer Clark Andrews in 1938, but they divorced four years later.
• Her second marriage to Cylos William Dunsmoore produced a son, Charles. The marriage ended in divorce in 1947.
• The next year, Trevor married Milton Bren, another film producer and soon after moved to Newport Beach, California.

Academy Awards

• Nominated Best Actress in a Supporting Role for The High and the Mighty (1954)
• Won Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Key Largo (1948)
• Nominated Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Dead End (1937)

Notable Films

• Dead End (1937)
• Stagecoach (1939)
• Murder, My Sweet (1944)
• The Babe Ruth Story (1948)
• Raw Deal (1948)
• Born to Kill (1947)

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