Screen Guild Theater: Variety Show / My Love Came Back / My Favorite Wife
Variety Show: Gary Cooper, Edward Arnold, Joan Bennett, Frances Langford, Fibber McGee & Molly My Love Came Back: Olivia de Havilland, Robert Young, Charles Winninger My Favorite Wife: Irene Dunne, Robert Montgomery, Franklin Pangborn Irene Dunne (December 20, 1898 -- September 4, 1990) was an American film actress and singer of the 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s. Dunne was nominated five times for the Academy Award for Best Actress, for her performances in Cimarron (1931), Theodora Goes Wild (1936), The Awful Truth (1937), Love Affair (1939) and I Remember Mama (1948). She was named to the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame in 1958. Irene, after adding an "e" to her surname, turned to musical theater, making her Broadway debut in 1922 in Zelda Sears's The Clinging Vine.[4] The following year, Dunne played a season of light opera in Atlanta, Georgia. Though in her own words Dunne created "no great furor," by 1929 she had a successful Broadway career playing leading roles, grateful to be at center stage rather than in the chorus line. In July 1928, Dunne married Francis Griffin, a New York dentist,[5] whom she had met in 1924 at a supper dance in New York. Despite differing opinions and battles that raged furiously,[2] Dunne eventually agreed to marry him and leave the theater. Dunne's role as Magnolia Hawks in Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II's Show Boat was the result of a chance meeting with showman Florenz Ziegfeld in an elevator the day she returned from ...
