There are many chorus girls from MGM’s older musicals whose life and careers are lost to history. For a change, Francis Belmont (dates unknown) was a chorus boy.
Belmont appeared in Dancing Lady in 1933, and no further information about him seems to be available.
Mary Wilbur (dates unknown) played a chorus girl in MGM’s Dancing Lady.
Any further information would be gratefully received.
Marion Weldon (1913-89) was barely sixteen when she appeared in the chorus line of Fox’s Words and Music (1929).
Over the next ten years, Weldon made over thirty appearances, usually as uncredited dancers, but with a few featured roles in ‘B’ westerns.
Along with what seems like every other chorus girl in Hollywood, Weldon was in MGM’s Dancing Lady in 1933.
There is probably much to say about Zelda Webber (dates unknown), but little of it is widely available.
What we do know is that she played a chorus girl in three pictures, for increasingly less glamorous studios. She started out in MGM’s Dancing Lady, and the following year was in Stand Up and Cheer! (1934) for Fox. After a gap of seven years, Webber was in Sis Hopkins (1941) at Republic.
A reasonable supposition might be that she she was working as a dancer in some other medium, but, at the moment, it must remain a supposition.
Ardelle Evelyn Unger (1914-60) was probably the only chorus girl in MGM’s Dancing Lady who could say her father worked as, amongst other things, a professional balloonist.
A born and bred Angeleno, Unger’s home town only used her in two other pictures, also as uncredited dancers. She then married comedian Jerry Lester and had three children.
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.
