In Remembrance: Virginia Grey

     Virginia Grey, the character actress who started as a child in silent films and worked all the way into the 1970s, has passed away in Los Angeles, Saturday, July 31, 2004. She was 87.

     Born on March 22, 1917 in Edendale, California, and grew up near Mack Sennett Studios where her father Ray Grey worked as an actor and director. Some of the young actress at the studio babysat Grey, including Gloria Swanson. After her father died when she was eight, her mother Florence Grey took a job as a film cutter at Universal Studios, where Grey was discovered walking on the lot one day by a casting director, who cast her as Little Eva in the 1927 adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. She appeared in a couple of more films before taking some time off for school and to study dance.

     Grey made infrequent appearance in uncredited bit parts in her teens in such films as Secrets (1933), which starred Mary Pickford and The Great Ziegfeld (1936) starring William Powell. She eventually landed a contract with MGM Studios who cast her opposite Bruce Cabot in Bad Guy and Richard Arlen in Secret Valley (both 1937). Though she didn't set the screen on fire, she was considered a solid, dependable actress. Grey soon began landing leads in B pictures and supporting roles in A pictures. She appeared in such pictures as Another Thin Man (1939), The Hardys Ride High (1939), The Big Store (1941), with the Marx Brothers, Tarzan's New York Adventure (1942) and Bells Of Capistrano (1942). One of her most memorable roles was that of a perfume counter girl who threw barbed comments at her social climbing co-worker played by Joan Crawford in 1939's The Women.

     She left MGM in 1942, working freelance for virtually all of the studios, though the films ranged in quality from the forgettable programmer Secrets of the Underground (1942) for Republic Pictures to the minor horror classic House Of Horror (1946) for Universal Pictures. She re-teamed with her Tarzan's New York Adventure co-star Johnny Weissmuller twice more. In 1946's Swamp Fire she vied for his affections with Carol Thurston, while in Jungle Jim (1948) she played a doctor searching for a cure for polio. Perhaps her best role during this time was that of Estelle Hohengarten in the Tennessee Williams adaptation The Rose Tattoo (1955).

     Gray also worked in early television, appearing on such shows as The Ford Theatre Hour, Four Star Playhouse, The Millionaire, Climax!, and Wagon Train.

     In the 1960s, Grey made only a handful of films, chief among them being the 1966 drama Madame X. Her last film was the 1970 thriller Airport. After a few more television appearances, Grey retired in the mid-1970s.