Career Highlights: The Glass Key, Elmer the Great, Blondie Johnson
First Major Screen Credit: Ex-Lady (1933)
Biography
Blonde leading lady Claire Dodd came to Hollywood by way of Broadway's Ziegfeld Follies. In films since 1930, Claire was for several years an employee of Warner Bros., where she played many a scheming seductress. She projected a more likeable, down-to-earth image as Della Street in a brace of Warners' "Perry Mason" movies, The Case of the Curious Bride (1935) and The Case of the Lucky Legs (1936)--actually marrying lawyer Mason (Warren William) in the latter film. Claire Dodd's last Hollywood years were spent at Universal Pictures in the early 1940s, where she played pleasant but colorless heroines; in one such assignment, Abbott and Costello's In the Navy (1941), Claire was reunited with her old Warners colleague Dick Powell. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Jack Milton Strauss (1931–1938) (divorced)
[H. Brand Cooper (1942–1973) (her death)
Claire Dodd (December 29, 1908 – November 23, 1973) was an American film actress.
Born Dorothy Anne Dodd in Des Moines, Iowa, Dodd's father was a doctor who abandoned her and her mother before she was ten years old. Her mother suffered from tuberculosis and was forced to support her, so young Dorothy moved to New York City at the age of 15 and joined the Ziegfeld Follies where she was eventually discovered by Darryl F. Zanuck.
She worked in almost sixty films in twelve years from 1930 to 1942. She quit films and married H. Brand Cooper to whom she gave and raised four children (she had one child from a previous marriage, Jon Michael Strauss, b. 1936), giving birth to her last child at the age of forty-seven.