Actress Frances Dee, hailed as one of the most beautiful women in motion pictures, was born Jane Dee in Los Angeles. An "Army brat," her officer father was transferred to Chicago shortly thereafter. Her movie career was the result of her father's being re-assigned to L.A. in 1929. Near Tinsel Town, Dee began appearing in movies as an extra, making her uncredited debut in "Words and Music" (1929). Her good looks brought her attention, and she soon established herself in "Playboy of Paris" (1930) opposite Maurice Chevalier. By the next year, she would claim one of the female leads in Josef von Sternberg's prestigious adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's "An American Tragedy" (1931), as the débutante whose desired lifestyle seduces a young man to commit murder to obtain it through her.
Dee established herself as a movie actress by skillfully underplaying her roles in comedies, dramas and Westerns. In the early part of her career, she was typically cast as sensible, good-hearted women in support of larger-than-life female stars, including Katharine Hepburn in "Little Women" (1933), Bette Davis in "Of Human Bondage"(1934) and Miriam Hopkins in "Becky Sharp" (1935). Occasionally, she would assay a lead role in A-pictures, such as Frank Lloyd's "If I Were King" (1938), opposite Ronald Colman.
One of the more memorable roles of her early career, a pre-Production Code film, was "Blood Money" (1933). The movie was re-discovered by a new generation of film-goers in the 1990s, with the burgeoning interest in pre-Code films, and helped acquaint Dee with a new, younger audience. Her biographer, Andrew Wentnik, said that, "When a friend recently admonished her for playing a prostitute in 'Blood Money', she denied it saying, 'I played a masochistic, nymphomaniacal kleptomaniac, not a prostitute.'"
She met the love of her life, Joel McCrea, on the set of the 1933 film "The Silver Cord". They would also appear together in "Wells Fargo" and "Four Faces West" (1948). The couple married in 1933 and were together for 57 years, until his death in 1990.
Dee was in several films produced by or associated with David O. Selznick, but ironically, she lost her chance to be in Selznick's greatest picture, "Gone with the Wind" (1939), due to her beauty. Selznick considered casting Dee as Melanie Wilkes, but backed off when he thought that her beauty might overshadow newcomer Vivien Leigh. Olivia de Havilland got the role instead, won an Oscar nomination and went on to a highly successful career. Dee's career, in contrast, never reached its potential, though she remained a working actress in Hollywood for as long as she wanted.
Perhaps her most memorable film is "I Walked with a Zombie" (1943, below). Dee said she accepted the role in Jacques Tourneur's low-budget thriller because of the fee, as she wanted to buy her mother a new automobile.
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