In Remembrance: Frances Dee

Hollywood screen beauty, Frances Dee, who co-starred in the 1930s and 40s with Maurice Chevalier, Gary Cooper, and her husband, Joel McCrea, has passed away on Saturday, March 6^th, 2004. She was 96.

Born Jean Dee to an Army officer father in Los Angeles on November 26, 1907, she grew up in Chicago. Dee began working in movies as an extra when her father was re-assigned to Los Angeles.

Dee made her uncredited debut in 1929’s Words and Music with Lois Moran. Dee’s breakthrough role came in 1930 opposite Maurice Chevalier in one of the first talkie musicals, The Playboy of Paris. Her refreshing good looks earned her leading roles in comedies and dramas, notably in the 1931 An American Tragedy as Sondra Finchley, the role played by Elizabeth Taylor in the 1951 remake A Place in the Sun.

Dee  appeared in many pre-censorship movies including the racy 1931 drama Working Girls, and she also starred alongside Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. in William Wellman’s comedy, Love Is A Racket (1932). She also appeared in such memorable films as 1933’s, Little Women, starring Katharine Hepburn and 1934’s Of Human Bondage, in which she played Leslie Howard's girlfriend. She also co-starred with Miriam Hopkins in Becky Sharp (1935). Other memorable films include 1937’s Souls at Sea with Gary Cooper and George Raft, If I Were King (1938), written by Preston Sturges and starring Ronald Colman, and 1943’s I Walked with a Zombie.

In 1933, Dee met Joel McCrea on the set of The Silver Cord. They married that year in Rye, N.Y., and they co-starred again in the westerns Wells Fargo (1937) and Four Faces West (1948).

She appeared in movies occasionally in the 1940s and 1950s and retired after Gypsy Colt in 1953. Husband Joel McCrea passed away in 1990.

-John Gibbon