Wild Women Of The West: Claire Trevor

Claire Trevor made famous the role of Dallas the soiled dove in the film Stagecoach. With a voice once described as sounding like delicious trouble, she was one of the most sought-after supporting actresses during the 1930s and 40s. 

She was born in New York City – movie buffs disagree whether it was 1909 or 1910 – to a Belfast, Ireland-born mother and a strict Paris born father who had a custom tailor shop on Fifth Avenue.

As a child, Trevor dreamed of being a ballerina. But along the way she became involved in church plays and fell in love with the stage. After studying art briefly at Columbia University, she attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. She had to drop out after six months, though, because her father’s business failed during the Depression, and he told her that she would have to help out.

“That shocked the hell out of me,” she later recalled. “We weren’t rich, but I never thought of money as being a worry, so it scared me. I thought, ‘What do I know how to do? Acting is the only thing I know how to do, and to get a job in the middle of the Depression in New York was not easy.

After a successful run on Broadway at the age of twenty-one, Trevor made her film debut in the early Western, Life in the Raw, and between 1933 and 1938, starred in over twenty movies including Dante's Inferno, Dead End and The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse starring Humphrey Bogart. In 1939, she co-starred with an unknown Wayne in Ford's classic, Stagecoach, and is one of few stars to have ever received top billing over The Duke.

Trevor appeared in other popular Westerns including Honky Tonk with The King of Hollywood, Clark Gable, and The Desperadoes starring Randolph Scott and Glenn Ford. She became known for her hard-boiled blondes in film noirs, winning her only Oscar for her performance in John Huston's Key Largo, but her unconventional Western roles popularized the bad girl of the Wild West making her a cornerstone of the genre.

The Oscar winning actress died on April 8, 2000, at the age of ninety.