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.
Unlike many of her fellow chorus girls in MGM’s Dancing Lady, Lucille Miller (1909-2002) had made at least twenty screen previous appearances, dating back to 1927.
Her first film was a Fox comedy short, A Midsummer Night’s Steam (1927), followed by work for Mack Sennett. Most of these early pictures were shorts, but Miller was credited in some of them. Her first uncredited appearance as a dancer in a musical feature was Her Golden Calf (1930, again for Fox.
Most of Miller’s features were ‘B’ pictures, and the AFI indicates she actually received a credit for Charlie Chan’s Courage (1940). Towards the close of her screen career, she did perform bits in more high-end films, including Men With Wings (1938), Western Union and A Yank in the RAF (both 1941).
After giving up acting, Miller ran the popular Colonel Bob’s Hobby Shop in Los Angeles, along with her husband, the eponymous Colonel.
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.
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 (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 (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.
