Minnie Dupree

Dupree, Minnie (1875?–1947), actress. Born in La Crosse, Wisconsin, the gamin‐faced performer made her debut in 1887 in a touring company of the The Unknown. The following year she appeared in a small role in New York in Held by the Enemy, but her talents were immediately recognized, and for the next dozen years Dupree was awarded important supporting roles in an unending series of plays. Her first leading role was the hapless heroine Mary Andrews in Women and Wine (1900), followed by the piquant Clara in The Climbers (1901); the good‐hearted Rose in A Rose o' Plymouth‐town (1902); the waitress who loves but loses her student prince in Heidelberg (1902); Helen Stanton, the daughter loyal to her long‐lost father, in The Music Master (1904); and both Elspeth and Lady Elizabeth Tyrrell in The Road to Yesterday (1906). After portraying the unhappily married Kate Grayson in The Real Thing (1911), she spent several years touring vaudeville in short plays. Most of Dupree's later appearances were in failures, the notable exceptions being the patient wife Matilda in The Old Soak (1922), the sullen stepmother Mrs. Burns in The Shame Woman (1923), and the newly dead Mrs. Midget in a touring company of Outward Bound (1924). In 1941 she was a replacement in the role of Martha Brewster in Arsenic and Old Lace. Dupree's final appearance was as the grandmother in Land's End (1946).