Frances Dee: Actress was Once Hailed as "The Most Beautiful Woman in Motion Pictures"

Was Married for 54 Years to Joel McCrae

Actress Frances Dee, hailed as one of the most beautiful women in motion pictures, was born Jane Dee in Los Angeles, on November 26, 1909. 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 Los Angeles in 1929.

Living in 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 The Playboy of Paris (1930) opposite French superstar Maurice Chevalier, a recent import to America. 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. (Elizabeth Taylor played the role in George Stevens' 1951 remake, A Place in the Sun.)

Frances 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.'"