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.
