Claire Trevor

Claire Trevor (born Claire Wemlinger, March 8, 1910 – April 8, 2000) was a pioneering American actress whose career spanned more than seven decades across stage, radio, television, and film. Born the only child of Noel Wemlinger, a French‑born tailor of German ancestry, and Irish‑heritage mother Benjamina, she grew up in Brooklyn before moving to Larchmont, New York. After high school she pursued art at Columbia University and drama at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, debuting on a repertory stage in Ann Arbor in 1929 and soon appearing in Vitaphone shorts and Broadway’s Whistling in the Dark (1932). Her first major screen role came with Jimmy and Sally (1933), and she quickly became a staple of 1930s Hollywood, noted for portraying tough, morally ambiguous blondes in films such as Dead End (1937) and the legendary Western Stagecoach (1939), where she earned top billing ahead of John Wayne.

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s Trevor solidified her reputation with complex, often tragic characters. Her performance as the doomed night‑club singer Gaye Dawn in Key Largo (1948) earned her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, and later nominations followed for The High and the Mighty (1954). She also won an Emmy in 1957 for the TV drama “Dodsworth.” After a gradual retreat from leading roles, she appeared sporadadly, with a notable turn as Sally Field’s mother in Kiss Me Goodbye (1982) and her final TV appearance in 1987. Trevor’s legacy endures through the Claire Trevor School of the Arts at UC Irvine, a Hollywood Walk of Fame star, and the preservation of her Oscar and Emmy statuettes, marking her as one of cinema’s most resilient and celebrated “queen of noir.”