Anne Gwynne

Spunky, bubbly B-movie star

Marguerite Gwynne Trice (Anne Gwynne), actress: born Waco, Texas 10 December 1918; married 1945 Max M. Gilford (died 1965; one son, one daughter); died Woodland Hills, California 31 March 2003.

A Titian-haired beauty with hazel eyes, Anne Gwynne was one of the most popular B-movie stars of the Second World War. Signed by Universal Studios after the shortest interview on record (47 seconds) and with no screen test, she featured in 38 films in the five years from 1939 to 1944. A favourite pin-up of the forces, she was billed by the studio as the "TNT" girl (trim, neat and terrific) and was voted "The Gal We'd Most Like to Corral" by a regiment of the Cavalry.

Born Marguerite Gwynne Trice in Waco, Texas, in 1918, as a teenager she moved with her family to Missouri, where she attended Stephens College in Columbia. Her father was an executive with Catalina Swimwear, and after accompanying him to a convention in Los Angeles she left college to take a job modelling bathing suits. This led to work with Little Theatre groups, where she acted in several plays including Stage Door.

She was spotted by talent scouts for both Universal and Warners, but her quick signing by Universal after a morning appointment caused her to cancel a test at Warners the same afternoon. After appearing in a short, Swimming Underwater (1939), she made her feature-film début in Unexpected Father (1939), a vehicle for the child star Baby Sandy. She was given her first leading role as heroine to the western star Johnny Mack Brown in Oklahoma Frontier (1939).

In the serial The Green Hornet (1940) she had a minor role along with another unknown, Alan Ladd, but she had a more substantial part in another serial, Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940) starring the former Olympic star "Buster" Crabbe as the intrepid hero.

Universal were noted for their horror movies, and Gwynne's first was Black Friday (1940), which starred both Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. Between films, she would pose for endless hours of cheesecake photography, including a memorable cover of Look magazine on 30 January 1940 which showed her swim-suited and drying her hair after an apparent dip in the pool.

The studio's top star was the singer Deanna Durbin, and Gwynne had one of her best roles in Spring Parade (1940), in which she was delightfully vivacious as Durbin's co-worker in a Viennese bakery. She and Durbin became good friends, and she was a bridesmaid at the star's wedding to Vaughn Paul in 1941. Gwynne also became good friends with another Universal heroine of B movies, Evelyn Ankers, and the director Reginald LeBorg recalled the difficulty the pair had when playing enemies in Weird Woman (1944):

Ankers was a good friend of Anne Gwynne's and they had to fight at one point because they were competing for Lon Chaney in the film. Ankers couldn't do it very well because she loved Gwynne so much that she couldn't be mean to her.

When Gwynne married the theatrical lawyer-producer Max M. Gilford in 1945, Ankers was her maid of honour.

It is the continuing popularity of the studio's horror films which has kept Anne Gwynne's name alive with film enthusiasts. Her films in the genre included a lively dark-house thriller, The Black Cat (1941), The Strange Case of Doctor Rx (1942), in which she was threatened by the stuntman and serial star Ray "Crash" Corrigan in a gorilla suit as Bongo the Ape, and House of Frankenstein (1944), notable for including three of the studio's top "monsters", Dracula (the splendid John Carradine), the Wolf Man (Lon Chaney) and the Frankenstein monster (Glenn Strange). Tom Weaver, the writer on horror movies, said,

To fans of the Universal horror films of the 1940s, Anne was one of the best and most popular leading ladies. She was the spunky, bubbly, very American girl-next-door type – the stuff of instant crushes for these movies' mostly male audiences.

Gwynne made many films outside the horror genre, among them her personal favourite, Ride 'Em Cowboy (1942), a vehicle for the comedy team Abbott and Costello, in which Gwynne played the girlfriend of a western writer (Dick Foran) who has little real knowledge of the West. Foran introduced the hauntingly reflective ballad "I'll Remember April" in the film, singing it to Gwynne during a moonlit ride.

Her other films included Broadway (1942), in which she was girlfriend to a racketeer (Broderick Crawford) whom she finally shoots because of his indiscretions, the westerns Men of Texas and Sin Town (both 1942), and the musicals Top Man (1943) with Donald O'Connor, and Moon Over Las Vegas (1944) in which she starred opposite David Bruce (father of the singer Amanda McBroom).

One of her most important films was Ladies Courageous (1944), in which she joined a starry group of actresses (Loretta Young, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Diana Barrymore, Evelyn Ankers) playing women who ferried bombers from port to port during the Second World War. The film was sanctioned by the US Army Air Force as the official story of the Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron.

The same year Gwynne starred in a superior comedy mystery, Murder in the Blue Room, co-written by the future Billy Wilder collaborator I.A.L. Diamond. An old mansion is reopened with a lively party after having been deserted for 20 years, there are secret passages and trap doors and the heiress Gwynne and three female singers called "The Jazzy-Belles" solve the crimes.

After leaving Universal in late 1944, Gwynne starred opposite Warren William in one of the finest films made by the minor studio Monogram, Fear (1946), loosely based on Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, and she co-starred with Boris Karloff again in Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome (1947). In 1947 she had the distinction of starring in the first filmed dramatic series for television, Public Prosecutor, making 26 episodes in 1947-48.

She semi-retired to raise her children, Gloria (who later changed her name to Gwynne) and Gregory, but returned to the screen with roles in the B westerns The Blazing Sun and King of the Bullwhip (both 1950). She received top billing in the exploitative Teenage Monster (1958), but acting offers were scarce and after she was widowed in 1965 she worked as a receptionist in a department-store beauty salon.

Gwynne returned briefly to the screen to play the mother of Michael Douglas in Adam at 6 A.M. (1970), and in 1982 told the writer Richard Lamparski that she would like to act again, speaking wistfully of her career:

I wish I had been more insistent on better pictures. Maria Montez complained about absolutely everything and told me not to be so co-operative. They made her a star, and I'm sure her demands had a lot to do with it. It was a busy, happy time in my life and I have no regrets, but I must admit that every now and then I wonder what might have happened if I'd kept that appointment at Warners.

Tom Vallance