Claire Trevor, shown in a 1938 photo, appeared in more than 60 films. The sultry-voiced actress won an Academy Award for her 1948 performance as a boozy, broken-down torch singer in Key Largo. (AP Photo)

April 10 — Claire Trevor, whose
repertory of tough dames and
femme fatales includes her
Oscar-winning role as Edward G.
Robinson's mistress in Key Largo,
died Saturday at age 91.

The actress died in a hospital near her
home in Newport Beach, Calif., friends said.

Trevor acted in some 70 films and 12
television productions, mostly from the
1930s through the 1950s, and was best
known for supporting roles as women who
stray from the path of virtue but end as
heroines.

She won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar
in 1948 for her role in Key Largo as Gaye
Dawn, the alcoholic mistress of cruel
gangster Edward G. Robinson, who, in one
famous scene, makes her sing for her next
drink.

The degraded Dawn saves hero Humphrey
Bogart from the gangster's clutches only to
be jailed as an accessory.

In John Ford's 1939 Western classic
Stagecoach, perhaps her most famous role,
Trevor played Dallas, an outcast saloon
prostitute who finds love and a second
chance with the outlaw Ringo Kid (John
Wayne). Trevor received top billing in the
film, which launched the career of the
lesser-known Wayne.

She was nominated for other Academy
Awards in one of her three later pictures
with Wayne — The High and the Mighty in
1954 — and also for her 1937 performance
as Bogart's girlfriend in a Manhattan, N.Y.,
slum in Dead End.

Trevor's women were often tougher than
the men she fancied in noirs like Raw Deal,
Born to Kill, and Murder My Sweet. Her
femme fatale always lost out to the
ingénues who were her romantic rivals,
either through her own fatalistic schemes
or through a last-minute pang of regret.

Born Claire Wemlinger in New York in 1909
(although some sources claim 1910 and
1912), she was raised in Larchmont, New
York. After graduating from high school in
Mamaroneck, she enrolled at Columbia
University. She then left to study briefly at
the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.

The expressive blonde began her film
career in the late 1920s and appeared on
Broadway and in Vitaphone short films in
1932. The next year, her first films, Jimmy
and Sally and Life in the Raw, began a
career of mostly supporting roles.

After her movie career tapered off in the
1950s, Trevor appeared on radio and
television, winning an Emmy for Best Live
Television Performance for her work in an
adaptation of Sinclair Lewis' novel
Dodsworth.

Her last film role was in Norman Rockwell's
Breaking Home Ties, made for television in
1987. Trevor outlived her husband,
Hollywood producer and agent Milton Bren.

A drama enthusiast, she donated $500,000
last year to the University of California,
Irvine, School of the Arts, which named the
Claire Trevor Bren Theater Stage after her.
She also traveled extensively and took up oil
painting.

In 1998, Trevor, along with all available past
Oscar winners, appeared onstage at the
70th Annual Academy Awards in the "Oscar
Family Album" segment.