Many of the young performers who played chorus girls in MGM’s Dancing Lady never did anything else, or at least were only cast as chorines. At least Marjorie Timm (190-86) could boast that, during her brief Hollywood career, she went from Dancing Lady to an uncredited appearance in DeMille’s Cleopatra (1934), a definite change of pace.
Timm said an upmarket farewell to her acting career in Charlie Chan at the Opera (1936), after just five pictures.
Irene Thompson (1910-70) had been doing extra work when she was spotted by Mack Sennett and featured in four of his comedy shorts.
She appeared in fifteen other pictures, but was uncredited. Thompson usually played chorus girls, including in MGM’s Dancing Lady and Reckless. Her third appearance in a Metro musical was in Born to Dance, where she played a guest at the Lonely Hearts Club. She had also played a stage actor in Twentieth Century (1934).
Thompson married cinematographer Charles Lawton Jr and raised a family. After his death, she went to work in Hawaii, in the hotel business.
Anita Merle Thompson (1915-91) was one of several seventeen-year-olds who played chorus girls in Metro’s Dancing Lady. From a Texas blue blood family, she had only recently arrived in Hollywood, but had already filmed similar appearances in Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) for Warner Bros and Arizona to Broadway (1933) for Fox.
Thompson was only in six more pictures, making her last, a non-musical called High Tension in 1936. Obviously a realist, she then chose retirement from the screen. She had married the year before, and raised a family in Los Angeles, later moving to Palm Springs. Her son Joseph Quillan became a noted sculptor.
Geneva Sawyer (1910-65) moved to California with her older sister Frances and their mother in the late 1920s. Both girls had started dance training at a young age.
She made her debut as a screen dancer in Fox’s weird It’s Great to Be Alive (1933), and in the same year she and her sister were chorus girls in MGM’s Dancing Lady.
Sawyer only made about a dozen screen appearances, but had much greater impact as a dance director, mostly at Twentieth Century-Fox, working with Shirley Temple on a number of her pictures, and on Down Argentine Way (1940). She also choreographed the dances in non-musicals such as The Mark of Zorro (1940) and A Yank in the RAF (1941).
Frances Sawyer (1909-99) was the older sister of the slightly better known Geneva Sawyer. Both started dance training as children and moved to California with their mother in the late 1920s.
Both young women appeared as chorus girls in MGM’s Dancing Lady, but Frances only made three further films, in 1934, 1936 and 1940.
Jackie Page (dates unknown) is one of several chorus girls in Metro’s Dancing Lady who has that as her sole IMDb listing.
There was a Jackie Paige, who made several appearances in Broadway musicals at around the same time, including the original production of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes.
IMDb tells a puzzling story about May Packer (dates unknown).
She was one of the many young women whose only musical appearance was as a chorus girl in MGM’s Dancing Lady. This is followed by a seven-year gap until an uncredited appearance in Girl from Avenue A (1940). Then another break, until her final role as a maid in In Our Time (1944).
There is a dearth of other information.
Patsy O’Dea (dates unknown) has just one IMDb entry, as one of the many chorus girls featured in MGM’s Dancing Lady.
The Internet Broadway Database holds details of a dancer named Patsy O’Day, who performed in Rosalie in 1928, and continued to feature in musical ensembles into the 1940s. The probability is that this is the same person, and IMDb has misspelled her name.
If this is the case, then she was actually Patricia Geraldine Guererra (1913-2004), and later in life, when her dancing career was over, she became a nursing assistant.
Iris Nicholson (1908-74) made her film debut aged seventeen in Smith’s Holiday (1928), one of Mack Sennett’s two-reel Smith family shorts.
She appeared in five more shorts in 1928-30, at the Sennett and Hal Roach studios. Then came a hiatus. Nicholson returned to the screen in 1933 as one of the chorus girls in Metro’s Dancing Lady, and then her career seems to have ended and she disappeared into obscurity.
Ruth Henrietta Moody (1917-90) was working in a dance troupe by the age of 16, at about the time she played one of the multitude of chorus girls in MGM’s Dancing Lady.
In 1935, Moody was apparently voted “most beautiful chorus girl” in a contest judged by Busby Berkeley, Dick Powell and Max Factor.
Moody only made about a dozen pictures, always uncredited, and her career was over by 1936, when she married tennis star Lester Stoefen.
