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.
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.
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 (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 (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.
June Bixler [?] (1917-2007) lived for ninety years, and spent just three of them as a Hollywood chorus girl.
Her first screen appearance, when she would have been just sixteen, was in MGM’s Dancing Lady. Surviving materials suggest that she might have featured in the robot wedding dance, which was filmed but then cut from the final film.
After four more appearances, including Al Jolson’s Wonder Bar (1934), her career would seem to have been over. She was married to songwriter Mack Gordon from 1939 to 1948, but the remainder of her life is, for now, a mystery.
Shirley Chambers (1913-2011) was nineteen when she played an assistant in a dress shop in the Warner’s comedy Gentleman for a Day (1932). In the same year she had credited roles in a Clark and McCullough comedy short, The Iceman’s Ball (1932), and in the Lupe Velez vehicle, The Half-Naked Truth (1932), which was directed by Gregory La Cava.
Chambers’s film career fluctuated between uncredited bit parts and down-the-bill credits in films such as Calm Yourself (1935), a comedy-mystery starring Robert Young. Her best role was probably Vera in Melody Cruise (1933), a Charles Ruggles comedy.
Some of her uncredited appearances were in quality pictures such as Nothing Sacred (1937, as Lady Godiva) and The Women (1939).
Chambers sustained film career ended after she played one of Belle’s girls in Gone with the Wind (1939), though she continued to act on the stage and was in 1947’s Home Stretch and one episode of the television series My Mother the Car in 1966.
Shirley Chambers’s connections with the MGM musical are Dancing Lady, as one of the scores of chorus girls, and the 1934 The Merry Widow, as a Maxim’s girl.
Laura Emma Clark (1911-64) made her film debut aged seventeen, in a Poverty Row comedy short called Sunshine’s Dark Moment (1929).
Many of her subsequent twenty or so appearances were as chorus girls, including one of the almost fifty used in MGM Dancing Lady. But she also had non-musical roles, such as the reception desk nurse in Laurel and Hardy’s classic County Hospital (1932).
She also had the occasional credited role, in films such as the Poverty Row western Law of the Rio (1931).
