"The Awful Truth" about Irene Dunne
Saturday, October 2, 2021 at 4:30PM by Baby Clyde
I adore Irene Dunne. Who doesn’t? She great in everything. She’s great AT everything. So why is she so little known these days? How can a woman who was an A List Movie star for 20 years during the Golden Age of Classic Hollywood be so little remembered? Obviously, she’s a big deal to Old Hollywood loving cinephiles but to the public at large she’s a more or less forgotten. I think this mainly comes down to the fact that she doesn’t really fit in anywhere. She was a Jack of all Trades and consequently isn’t specifically identified with one genre. In many ways her versatility was her downfall (in terms of staying in the public imagination).
She started in movies quite late. Born in 1898 she was already a fair bit older than most of her contemporaries when she headed West, after a successful if unspectacular Broadway career. Making her first film in 1930 she was an immediate hit. Her second film, 1931’s Cimarron, won the Best Picture Academy Award and she received the 1st of her five Best Actress nominations...
She was an A list top billed star for the rest of her career appearing in Westerns and Romances, Historical Dramas and Comedies, Weepies, Musicals and Biopics... though she was never the Queen of any one category. She was a great dramatic actress but not Bette Davis. She could handle comedy with the best of them but Carole Lombard and Claudette Colbert were more celebrated. She was a beauty but not Hedy Lamarr, a great singer but no Jeanette MacDonald. Her classic partnerships with Cary Grant and Charles Boyer don’t compare to William Powell and Myrna Loy’s. There were no celebrity marriages, no scandals, no lesbian rumours, and thankfully no tragic early death. She was just a consummate professional beloved by all and married to her dentist husband for 38 years.
But competence, likeability and fidelity do not a mythology make.
Remakes of many of her hits became more famous than the originals
One major factor in her current low profile is the sheer amount of her most famous films that were later remade. In some cases, becoming classics themselves and completely overshadowing her extremely popular originals. Two of Deborah Kerr’s greatest roles were initially Irene Dunne’s. An Affair To Remember was a remake of 1939’s Love Affair and The King And I was a musical reimagining of 1946’s Anna and The King of Siam. Jane Wyman’s classic Magnificent Obsession (1954) was first made with Irene in 1935. The Oscar winning Cimmaron became a big budget all-star spectacular in 1960 and Back Street (1933) was remade twice in 1941 and 1961. Showboat got the MGM treatment 1951. The 1941 classic My Favourite Wife, renamed Something’s Got To Give, was the last films Marilyn Monroe worked on before her untimely death and eventually become Doris Day’s smash hit Move Over Darling. Even today’s most famous directors have gotten in on the act. Spielberg’s Always (1989) was originally the Irene Dunne and Spencer Tracy hit A Guy Named Joe and guess who appeared in the only talkie version of The Age of Innocence before Scorsese’s 1993 attempt?
Less successful in terms of Dunne remakes was the leaden 1953 musical Let’s Do It Again which starred Jane Wyman. It’s thankfully forgotten today. While the original source was a hit play the property's most popular incarnation was happily Irene Dunne’s finest moment in the movies: the sparkling, hilarious screwball comedy The Awful Truth.
It’s one of my all-time favourite films and it's every bit as funny today as it was 1937 and one of the few movies that will make you laugh out loud no matter how many times you've seen it.
In the first half of the 1930s Dunne had made her name suffering nobly in a string of, melodramatic ‘women’s pictures’, so it was something of a shock to audiences (and apparently Irene herself) when she turned her hand to comedy in the uproarious Theodora Goes Wild (1936) and followed that up in 1937 with the first of her three screen appearances with Cary Grant (She received top billing each time). Indeed, it was The Awful Truth that helped turn Grant from a popular but indistinct B list leading man to the topflight star and comedic giant we all know and still love today.
The Awful Truth tells the story of a society couple who file for divorce after a series of comedic misunderstandings and then proceed to sabotage each other’s subsequent relationships, reuniting just before their divorce becomes final. Both stars are in top form but Irene steals the show with one of the true bravura comedic turns of the 1930s, a decade that had plenty of fine comedies. Pretending to be her soon to be ex-husband’s low class sister, she causes mayhem by crashing a soiree for his new socialite girlfriend. Drinking, spilling made up family secrets and performing a tacky musical number to the appalled fiancé’s parents. ‘Don’t anybody leave this room; I’ve lost my purse’ will never not be funny.
The film won Leo McCarey his first best director Oscar and was probably the closest Irene ever came to a win. She lost to Luise Rainier for the 2nd time in 2 years making her the first Oscar nominee to lose twice to the same person.
Despite a late start, Dunne also left show biz relatively early. Her last film was 1952’s It Grows On Trees and while she did some bits of TV and radio, she had essentially retired by the mid 50’s. No longer on the big screen she went on to live a high profile, glamourous life as Hollywood royalty. Best dressed lists, charity boards, humanitarian work and an appointment as a delegate to The United Nations kept her in the public eye. She was also a frequent presenter at the Academy Awards, but never acted again.
There were no book tours, no Broadway shows, no obligatory Blackglama commercial and no chat show appearances to bolster her fame with a younger generation. Most outrageously there was no Honorary Oscar.
Don’t get me started on the mystifying decisions made in this arena over the years but the most shameful of all is the snubbing of a woman who graciously lost five times and lived to be 91 years old. Dunne's contemporaries Myrna Loy and Barbara Stanwyck both received them. The Academy also bizarrely re-rewarded Jimmy Stewart, Laurence Olivier and Alec Guinness and somehow contrived to award both of Irene’s Awful Truth co-stars Cary Grant and Ralph Bellamy, but the woman who was billed above both of them got nothing. Makes me mad to this day. She was, at least, a Kennedy Centre Honoree in 1985.
Am I taking these slights too seriously? The lady herself remained unbothered. "I don't mind at all," she said, "Greta Garbo never got an Oscar either and she's a living legend." But so was Irene Dunne. It’s just a shame that the world doesn’t remember……and that’s The Awful Truth.
Reader Comments (8)
When I see her on screen especially in comedy she's a joy (she was good in most dramas, Cimarron is a ghastly nightmare to sit through though, and her singing isn't for me) charming and facile but..... having read Judy Lewis' autobiography her description of her mother Loretta Young's best friend Irene as a chilly, sanctimonious remote woman who only turned the charm on for the cameras diminished her I'm afraid.
I try to put that aside when I watch her movies and mostly succeed but knowing its all a front keeps me from being a truly big fan. I realize she's not the only star who is different behind the scenes, I'm positive most are, but that she was so opposite just rubs the wrong way.
With that said her films by and large are a good lot. My top ten of her films are:
When Tomorrow Comes
Anna and the King of Siam
Over 21
The Awful Truth
My Favorite Wife
Unfinished Business
It Grows on Trees
The Mudlark
Love Affair
Theodora Goes Wild
As far as comedy goes, let us not forget A Guy Named Joe where Irene single-handedly commandeers a bomber to take out a Jap ammunition dump single-handedly (Ah, war propoganda!)
She's also fantastic in Show Boat (the greatest American stage musical of all time) a superb version directed uncharacteristically and superbly by James Whale (!) of all people complete with Irene doing a number (Galavantin' Around) - in blackface!
I also like her a lot in Penny Serenade, which, in a reverse from The Awful Truth, Cary Grant was Oscar nominated and she was passed over. I think he should have won
Just realized her eerie similarity with Deborah Kerr!
Loving these retrospective looks on the great actresses of the past. Keep it going!
The Awful Truth is probably my favorite screwball comedy, but for whatever reason, it seems weirdly underdiscussed today as well. I only saw it for the first time a few years ago, and that was because I was working my way through new Criterion releases. It should be more appreciated because, unlike some of the more vaulted classics of the era (most of Katharine Hepburn's early filmography, for example), there aren't any cringeworthy sexist bits.
I like Dunne, but at times I feel like there is a bit of a distance between her, the audience, and the character. Maybe it's that lack of connection that kept her off to the side in her career and legacy.
Having said that, I really do enjoy her in The Awful Truth, Theodora Goes Wild and Magnificent Obsession. She's just not an actress whose filmography I want to complete.
@joel6: Interesting observation. I'd love to know more about her. The Awful Truth is a great comedy and she is brilliant in it, and I may be in the minority in thinking Love Affair is better than An Affair to Remember. So why do people not remember her? Why did the Academy nominate her but not reward her, even with an honorary statue?
I adore Irene Dunne, and from all other accounts, she was very likeable offscreen; at work she was professional, no-nonsense, no diva tendencies, and certainly no Hollywood histronics or scandals. She was only married once, to a dentist, and adopted one daughter around the time she filmed Penny Serenade. She was very conservative and a devout Catholic, and practiced her religion all her life in terms of charitable works. But perhaps because there's no scandal, modern audiences aren't all that interested?
In fact, like Barbara Stanwyck, film crews adored her. Always a very positive thing in my book.
Two other films I quite liked: A Guy Named Joe, with Spencer Tracy and Van Johnson (not a fan of that guy) and The White Cliffs of Dover, a war weepy that also starred a young Roddy McDowell and Elizabeth Taylor (before National Velvet).
Her comedic talents in My Favorite Wife makes it my favorite Dunne film. "'zzz..xactly" with a southern drawl is a line I use all the time.
Thank you for this thorough article. It greatly saddens me that she does not have an Oscar. She is one of my favorite actresses from this era. Her performances in Love Affair, Penny Serenade and The Awful Truth are spectacular. I find it hard to choose between her and Garbo in 1937. I believe one of these ladies should have taken the Oscar, though I do greatly admire Luise Rainer's work in The Good Earth.
I recently watched Ms. Dunne in The White Cliffs of Dover, a glorious weepy from that period that is catnip for my particular taste.