About Me
Claire Trevor was born Claire Wemlinger on March 8th 1910 in New York, N.Y.
Nicknamed "The Queen of Film Noir"
Trevor's acting career spanned more than seven decades and included success in stage, radio, television and film. Trevor often played the hard-boiled blonde, and every conceivable type of "bad girl" role. After attending American Academy of Dramatic Arts, she began her acting career in the late '20s in stock. By 1932 she was starring on Broadway; that same year she began appearing in Brooklyn-filmed Vitaphone shorts. Her feature film debut came in Jimmy and Sally (1933) as "Sally Johnson". Other notable performances were in the classic western Stagecoach with John Wayne and Murder, My Sweet opposite Dick Powell.
Claire Trevor won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her 1948 performance in Key Largo, co-starring Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson and Lauren Bacall. She was also nominated for the same award for Dead End, a 1937 melodrama in which she played a good girl who grows up to be a prostitute, and The High and the Mighty, a 1954 airplane disaster epic starring John Wayne. In 1956, Trevor won an Emmy for Best Live Television Performance by an Actress for Dodsworth, with Fredric March, on NBC's Producers' Showcase.
The Claire Trevor School of the Arts at the University of California, Irvine was named in Trevor's honor. Both her Oscar and Emmy trophies are on display in the Arts Plaza there, next to the Claire Trevor Theatre.
She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Trevor married film producer Clark Andrews in 1938, but they divorced four years later. Her second marriage to Cylos William Dunsmoore produced a son, Charles. The marriage ended in divorce in 1947. The next year, Trevor married Milton Bren, another film producer and soon after moved to Newport Beach, California.
In 1978 her only biological child, her son Charles Dunsmoore, died in an airliner crash and her last husband, Milton Bren, died from a brain tumor in 1979. Trevor retired from acting in 1987. She made a special Academy Awards Appearance in 1998 at the 70th Academy Awards.
She lived in Newport Beach until April 8, 2000 to the age of 90, survived by several step-children by her marriage to Bren. Claire Trevor was cremated and her remains were scattered at sea.
