FRANCES DEE

Frances Dee was born in 1909, and she started as an extra while still a teenager. Her great beauty gained her more important roles, but she was almost always cast as a "good girl" (except in the pre-Code Blood Money, where she described her role as a "masochistic nymphomaniacal kleptomaniac"). But she usually was the second female lead in movies like Little Women, Of Human Bondage, and Becky Sharp. She had a few lead roles, but she met Joel McCrea while they were making a movie together in 1933, and they married that same year, and after that her marriage and their three sons took center stage in her life. She made sporadic movie and TV appearances in the 1940s and early 1950s (most notably in I Walked With a Zombie!), and then she completely retired in 1954, and McCrea basically retired in 1962, and the two lived together at their 300 acre ranch in Thousand Oaks, California (they were quite wealthy). They remained married until he passed away in 1990, and she passed away in 2004 at the age of 94.