The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Films

  • Margaret McConnell

    There were dozens of young women playing chorus girls in MGM’s Dancing Lady in 1933, but only Margaret Isabelle McConnell (1910-2011) lived to see the launch of the iPad. 

    Sadly, there is very little information about what she did during this long life, apart from a brief period (1933-36) when she was a model and bit part actor. Her local newspaper was excited enough to report:

    “Attention of friends and others of the Kewanna community has been centered recently on pictures of a beautiful girl from there who is pursuing an art career in Chicago.  This young lady is Miss Margaret McConnel, of Kewanna, a graduate of Kewanna high school.  She recently finished her art studies and is now in a studio doing sketches for several department stores in Chicago.  In addition she acts as a model in some of the stores and also poses for pictures for magazine advertisements.”

    She only seems to have been in three other pictures. But, like many others, must have had a good agent, because one photo library holds a shot of her from 1934 chatting to the then quite young Mickey Mouse. 

    McConnell married the architect William Pereira, and has been relegated to a sidenote in his story.

  • Betty Lorraine / Lorraine Marshall

    Confusion shrouds the tragically short life of Betty Cornelia Mumford (19??-44). Her year of birth has been stated as 1908, 1912 and 1914. Many of her screen appearances (including credited roles) were under the name Betty Lorraine; she seems to have used the name Lorraine Marshall when she felt like it. Let’s just call her Lorraine.

    Lorraine was a child dancer who made her screen debut playing Miss Belgium in Fox’s None But the Brave (1928), aged anywhere between 14 and 20. In the same year she had a credit as ‘Slinky’ in Red Wine (1928), a Conrad Nagel romantic comedy.

    By 1931, Lorraine was an uncredited Goldwyn Girl in Palmy Days. In 1933, she was uncredited in MGM’s Dancing Lady, and also in Gold Diggers of 1933 and Footlight Parade, where she stands out in the ‘Shanghai Lil’ number. But, in the same year, she had a credited role in Maurice Chevalier’s A Bedtime Story. 

    Parts had pretty much dried up by 1937, so she worked as a band singer, and apparently appeared in one Broadway musical. But by 1943, she was playing a harem girl in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. 

    Judged to have been clinically depressed, Lorraine took her own life in 1944. A short life, but she had been married four times.

  • Chicquita Marcia

    Chicquita Marcia (dates unknown) may have spelled her name like that. Or perhaps she preferred Chiquita. There is no way of knowing. All the internet can tell us is that she was a chorus girl, alongside many other chorus girls, in MGM’s Dancing Lady.

    All information is gratefully received.

  • Kay Gordon

    Kay Gordon (1913-85) made her debut playing a chorus girl in Fox’s revue Happy Days (1929). She played the same role in about a dozen other films from 1930 to 1942, including MGM’s Dancing Lady and Hollywood Party.

    Gordon was given time off in 1936 to play a manicurist in Big Brown Eyes, an early Cary Grant vehicle.

  • Fay Estelle

    In 1933, MGM seems to have rounded up every young dancer in Hollywood for the chorus lines of Dancing Lady. Fay Estelle (dates unknown) was one of them.

    Estelle only has one other IMDb credit, but it is an interesting one. In the early thirties, the Fox studio, like others, produced foreign-language pictures for the European and South American markets. One such was the Spanish Asegure a su mujer (1935), a Lubitsch-type romantic comedy in which Estelle featured. The film has Spanish actors in the leading roles, with Americans giving support. There is no record that an English-language version was ever made.   

  • Eleanor Edwards

    Eleanor Edwards (dates unknown) was one of the many young dancers who made their first screen appearance in MGM’s Dancing Lady.

    After similar uncredited roles in George White’s Scandals and Stand Up and Cheer! (both 1934, both at Fox), Ms Edwards is lost to history.

  • Veleda Duncan

    Veleda Duncan (dates unknown) appeared in a Mack Sennett short, played a ballerina in the unwatcheable Mack and Moran comedy Hypnotized (1932), and was a chorus girl in MGM’s Dancing Lady. That is what we know.

    Veleda is a name meaning ‘seer’ or ‘wise one’, and Isadora Duncan was a famous dancer, so Veleda Duncan may have been the stage name of an aspiring artistic dancer. That is what we surmise.

  • Nadine Dore

    A 1926 press report describes Phyllis Nadine Redman (1912-92) as “probably the only chorus girl in the history of that calling who owns an airplane and is able to fly it”. She was only fourteen at the time (the report claims 17) so you would have to say, remarkable if true.

    The following year, Dore won the first of many beauty pageants and, being a resident of Culver City, she inevitably had her eyes set on film stardom. Ironic, then, that her break into show business meant going east to appear in a Broadway production of New Moon. By the time she was sixteen, she had been in three Broadway shows.

    Returning to Hollywood in 1929, Dore got into film musicals pretty much at the ground floor, playing a chorus girl in RKO’s successful version of Rio Rita (1929). The only way from there was down. Dore had a few credited roles in Poverty Row westerns, but was otherwise restricted to uncredited bit parts. At one point she changed her name to Carol Wyndham, to little effect, though it is claimed by some sources that she had a line in Nothing Sacred (1937).

    She subsequently worked on the nightclub circuit, before becoming an ‘exotic dancer’. Her later life seems to have been colourful, including an arrest for fortune telling early in her career as an astrologer.

    Before any of this, Dore was a chorus girl in MGM’s Dancing Lady.

    Thanks to Vitaphone Zone for much of this information.

  • Dale Dee

    Dale Dee (1914-94) was another of those transient young women who filled Hollywood’s chorus lines in the 30s and have left little information behind.

    Like many, her first screen appearance, aged 20, was in MGM’s Dancing Lady. After a handful of appearances, her career culminated with In Old Chicago (1938).

  • Dorothy Dearing

    Dorothy Dearing (1913-65) was one of the many young women in the Golden Age who travelled to Hollywood with their mothers in search of fame. She was essentially a dancer, and apparently had been giving dancing lessons to others by the time she was 16.

    After a period of auditions and routine jobs, Dearing obtained a contract with Fox in 1933, and seems to have been immediately loaned out to MGM, who needed vast numbers of chorus girls for Dancing Lady.

    Dearing accumulated around thirty appearances over the next ten years. Most were uncredited, a handful were not. One of her credited roles was in Free, Blonde and 21 (1940), which starred her fellow Dancing Lady chorine, Lynn Bari.

    Dearing bowed out of Hollywood with Thunder Birds: Soldiers of the Air (1942), moving into the import/export business. 

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