Irene Dunne (Portrait Treatment) 2010

1. Born Irene Marie Dunn in Louisville, Kentucky on December 20, 1898, to Joseph Dunn, a steamboat inspector for the United States government, and Adelaide Henry, a concert pianist/music teacher from Newport, Kentucky, Irene Dunn would later write "No triumph of either my stage or screen career has ever rivalled the excitement of trips down the Mississippi on the river boats with my father." She was only eleven when her father died in 1909. She saved all of his letters and often remembered and lived by what he told her the night before he died: "Happiness is never an accident. It is the prize we get when we choose wisely from life's great stores."

2. 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. 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. Dunne met her future husband, Francis Griffin, a New York dentist, at a supper dance in New York. Despite differing opinions and battles that raged furiously, Dunne eventually agreed to marry him and leave the theater.

3. Dunne commented in an interview that she had lacked the "terrifying ambition" of some other actresses and said, "I drifted into acting and drifted out. Acting is not everything. Living is." It has been surmised, "She was strikingly beautiful and enormously gifted for drama, musicals, or comedy (an art at which...she was one of the best and most underrated)." Dunne has been described as the best actress never to win an Academy Award. She received five Best Actress nominations during her career: for Cimarron (1931), Theodora Goes Wild (1936), The Awful Truth (1937), Love Affair (1939) and I Remember Mama (1948).

4. In 1957, Dwight David Eisenhower appointed Dunne one of five alternative U.S. delegates to the United Nations in recognition of her charitable works and interest in conservative Roman Catholic and Republican causes. In her retirement, Dunne devoted herself primarily to civic, philanthropic, and Republican political causes. In 1965, Dunne became a board member of Technicolor, the first woman ever elected to the board of directors.

5. Dunne died peacefully at her Holmby Hills home in Los Angeles, California in 1990, and is entombed in the Calvary Cemetery in East Los Angeles, California.