Ann Dvorak

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Ann Dvorak
Ann Dvorak.jpg
from the film
Housewife (1934).
Background information
Born Aug 2, 1912
Birth place: New York, New York USA Flag of USA.png
Born as Anna McKim
Died Dec 10, 1979 - age  66
  Honolulu, Hawaii USA Flag of USA.png

Ann Dvorak (August 2, 1912 – December 10, 1979) was an American film actress.

Born Anna McKim in New York, New York, Dvorak was the daughter of silent film actress Anna Lehr and the actor/director, Samuel McKim, and as a child appeared in several films.

Ann dvorak1.jpg

She began working for MGM in the late 1920s as a dance instructor and gradually began to appear on film in small musical roles. Howard Hughes groomed her as a dramatic actress and she was a success in such pre-Code films as Scarface (1932), as Paul Muni's sister, as the doomed unstable "Vivian" in Three on a Match (1932), with Joan Blondell and Bette Davis, Love Is a Racket (1932), and opposite Spencer Tracy in Sky Devils (1932).

Known for her style and elegance, she was a popular leading for Warner Brothers during the 1930s and appeared in numerous contemporary romances and melodramas. A dispute over her pay (she discovered she was making the same amount of money as the little boy who played her son in Three on a Match) led to her finishing out her contract on permanent suspension and then working as a freelancer, but although she worked regularly, the quality of her scripts declined sharply. She appeared as secretary Della Street in 1937's vehicle for Donald Woods in Perry Mason: The Case of the Stuttering Bishop.

With her British husband, the actor Leslie Fenton, Dvorak traveled to England where she supported the war effort by working as an ambulance driver and worked in several British films. She retired from the screen in 1951, when she married her 3rd and final husband (Nicholas Wade), to whom she remained married until his death in 1977. She had no children.

She lived her post-retirement years in anonymity until her death (from undisclosed causes) in Honolulu, Hawaii at the age of 68. She was cremated and her ashes scattered.

Ann Dvorak has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contribution to Motion Pictures, at 6321 Hollywood Boulevard.

Asked how to say her name, she told The Literary Digest: "My name is properly pronounced vor'shack. The D remains silent. I have had quite a time with the name, having been called practically everything from Balzac to Bickelsrock." (Charles Earle Funk, What's the Name, Please?, Funk & Wagnalls, 1936.)

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