Gorgeous Photos of American Actress Claire Dodd in the 1930s

Born 1911 in Baxter, Iowa, American actress Claire Dodd was cast in a small part in Eddie Cantor’s movie Whoopee! (1928) while working as a model in Los Angeles. She joined the Ziegfeld Follies and moved to New York City, where she studied singing and dancing.

Dodd went on to work at Warner Brothers, Paramount and Universal studios in more than sixty films over a dozen years, from 1930-42. She was usually type-cast as the “other woman”, a femme fatale, siren, seductress, mistress, blackmailer, or other kind of schemer. But she also twice played secretary Della Street to Warren William’s Perry Mason, in The Case of the Curious Bride (1935), and The Case of the Velvet Claws (1936). In the latter, Dodd’s character was the only incarnation of Della Street to ever wed Mason. One of her last films was Abbott and Costello’s In the Navy (1941).

Dodd retired from acting in 1942. She died at her home in Beverly Hills, California, from cancer, aged 61. Take a look at these gorgeous photos to see the beauty of young Claire Dodd in the 1930s.