June MacCloy , a statuesque actress whose glamorous looks typified the Golden Age of Hollywood and whose mannish voice set her apart, has died. She was 95.
MacCloy died May 5 of natural causes in a nursing home in Sonoma, Calif., said Peter Mintun, a family friend.
“She didn’t even volunteer to tell people she’d been in the movies. She was of the old frame of mind that movie people were looked down upon by certain people in society,” Mintun, a New York pianist and singer who befriended the actress a decade ago, told the Los Angeles Times.
By 21, MacCloy had left behind New York and a role in a vaudeville production designed by a young Vincente Minnelli for a film career that would run 10 years. Paramount Pictures signed her to appear in film shorts in 1930 and immediately loaned her to United Artists, where she made her first feature, “Reaching for the Moon,” with Douglas Fairbanks Sr.
Her singing in the film of Irving Berlin’s “When the Folks High Up Do the Mean Low Down,” following renditions by a young Bing Crosby – who had last billing – prompted The Times to write, “With a little encouragement, she would have stolen the picture.”
She would steal a few hearts along the way, marrying four times, along with romances that were documented in gossip and news columns.
Her second motion picture was “June Moon” (1931) with Frances Dee and Jack Oakie, a film “Leonard Maltin’s Classic Movie Guide” calls “an odd but generally amusing mix of naivete and sophistication.”
Most of MacCloy’s films were less well received.
She also made at least nine film shorts, including three directed by the scandal-tainted Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, working under the alias William Goodrich. (“Fatty Arbuckle was a peach of a guy,” she told Mintun.)
Her last screen role, as the saloonkeeper Lulubelle in “Go West” (1940), is remembered for its climactic train ride and the pickup line Groucho Marx used on MacCloy’s character: “Let’s go somewhere where we can be alone. Ah, there doesn’t seem to be anyone on this couch.”
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