Dorothy Rae Coonan (1913-2009) started dancing professionally aged 14, making her first screen appearance in the chorus line of The Broadway Melody. She worked several times on films choreographed by Busby Berkeley.
In 1933, director William Wellman gave her one of the leads in Wild Boys of the Road. She played Sally, the teenage hobo who disguises herself as a boy to ride the freight trains.
She and Wellman married in the following year, and remained together for over four decades, until his death in 1975.
Dorothy Wellman retired after her marriage, though she did make an uncredited appearance as a nurse in her husband’s The Story of GI Joe (1945). IMDb states she played a chorus girl in Sis Hopkins (1941), a low-budget Judy Canova comedy, but this seems unlikely.
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