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Biography: Ann Dvorak

American actress Ann Dvorak was the daughter of silent film director Sam McKim and stage actress Anne Lehr ("Dvorak" was her mother's maiden name). Educated at Page School for Girls in Los Angeles, Dvorak secured work as a chorus dancer in early talking films: she is quite visible amongst the female hoofers in Hollywood Revue of 1929 (1929). Reportedly it was her friend Joan Crawford, a headliner in Hollywood Revue, who introduced Dvorak to multimillionaire Howard Hughes, then busy putting together his film Scarface (1931). Dvorak was put under contract and cast in Scarface as gangster Paul Muni's sister, and despite the strictures of film censorship at the time, the actress' piercing eyes and subtle body language made certain that the "incest" subtext in the script came through loud and clear. Hughes sold Dvorak's contract to Warner Bros., who intended to pay her the relative pittance she'd gotten for Scarface until she decided to retreat to Europe. Warners caved in with a better salary, but it might have been at the expense of Dvorak's starring career. Though she played roles in such films as Three on a Match (1932) and G-Men (1935) with relish, the characters were the sort of "life's losers" who usually managed to expire just before the fadeout, leaving the hero to embrace the prettier, less complex ingenue. Dvorak cornered the market in portraying foredoomed gangster's molls with prolonged death scenes, but they were almost always secondary roles. One of her rare forays into comedy occurred in producer Hal Roach's Merrily We Live (1938), an amusing My Man Godfrey rip-off. In 1940, Dvorak followed her first husband to England, starring there in such wartime films as Squadron Leader X (1941) and This Was Paris (1942). Upon her return to Hollywood in 1945, Dvorak found very little work beyond westerns and melodramas; she did have a bravura role as a cabaret singer held prisoner by the Japanese in I Was an American Spy (1951), but it was produced at second-string Republic Pictures and didn't get top bookings. After Secret of Convict Lake (1951), Dvorak quit film work; she had never found it to be as satisfactory as her stage career, which included a year's run in the 1948 Broadway play The Respectful Prostitute. During her retirement, spent with her third husband, she divided her time between her homes in Malibu and Hawaii, and her passion for collecting rare books. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide less

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Movies (48)
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I Was an American Spy (1951)
Tags: Biopic Spy Film War War Spy Film
Length: 85min
I Was an American Spy is a true story, based on a series of autobiographical ~Reader's Digest articles written by Claire Phillips. Ann Dvorak stars as Ms. Phillips, an American nightclub singer trapped in Singapore when the Japanese march in. Having...
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A Life of Her Own (1950)
Cast: George Cukor Lana Turner
Tags: Melodrama Drama Romance
Length: 108min
Lana Turner stars as an ambitious model who seeks her fortune in New York City. She is befriended by over-the-hill cover-girl Ann Dvorak, whose performance carries the story until she commits suicide twenty minutes into the film. Turner promises...
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The Secret of Convict Lake (1951)
Cast: Ethel Barrymore Glenn Ford Gene Tierney
Tags: Adventure Drama Crime Drama Action Crime Western
Length: 83min
Glenn Ford plays a convict who breaks out of a 19th century Nevada prison in the company of several less handsome inmates. When they enter a snowbound California village, they find that all the men have left to prospect for silver; only the women...
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Our Very Own (1950)
Cast: Samuel Goldwyn Natalie Wood Jane Wyatt
Tags: Drama Melodrama
Length: 93min
Joyfully preparing for her high-school graduation, and her 18th birthday, Gail Macauley (Ann Blyth) stumbles across a family secret. Contrary to what she's been raised to believe, Gail's parents (Jane Wyatt, Donald Cook) are not her biological...
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The Private Affairs of Bel Ami (1947)
Cast: Angela Lansbury George Sanders John Carradine
Tags: Drama Period Film
Length: 112min
Writer/director Albert Lewin, ever on the lookout for esoteric story material that would accommodate his fascination with Egyptian sculpture and feline symbolism, managed to inject both into The Private Affairs of Bel Ami. Though based on a Guy de...
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The Return of Jesse James (1950)
Cast: Hugh O'Brian
Tags: Western
Length: 77min
Return of Jesse James is an excellent example of how to get full value for money from an attenuated budget. John Ireland plays Johnny, a bank robber who closely resembles the late Jesse James. As Johnny's crime spree spreads, so do rumors that Jesse...
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The Long Night (1947)
Cast: Henry Fonda Vincent Price
Tags: Film Noir Crime Drama Drama
Length: 101min
Based upon the French film Le Jour Se Lève, The Long Night opens in the in the midst of a dire situation: ex-serviceman Joe Adams (Henry Fonda) finds himself holed up in his apartment, surrounded by policemen who soon open fire in a relentless and...
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Abilene Town (1946)
Cast: Edgar Buchanan Rhonda Fleming Randolph Scott Lloyd Bridges
Tags: B-Western Western
Length: 90min
Dan Mitchell (Randolph Scott) is the town marshal of Abilene, KS, in the turbulent years after the Civil War and the start of the big cattle drives out of Texas. The town is growing faster than a lot of citizens are prepared to deal with it,...
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Out of the Blue (1947)
Tags: Comedy
Length: 86min
If Eagle-Lion's Out of the Blue looks more like a slick Warner Bros. product at times, it's because the film was peopled by former Warners personnel, both in front of and behind the cameras. George Brent and Carole Landis play the Earthleighs, tenants...
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The Bachelor's Daughters (1946)
Cast: Claire Trevor Adolphe Menjou
Tags: Comedy Romance
Length: 88min
Andrew Stone's The Bachelor's Daughters has much of the nonsensical breeziness of Stone's earlier screwball comedy Hi Diddle Diddle; the stylistic link between the two properties is emphasized by the presence in both films of stars Adolphe Menjou and...
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Biography: Ann Dvorak

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