Early Career
Born Doris Jensen, Gray was a farmer's daughter from Nebraska. After graduating from high school, she studied dramatics at Hamline University, graduating with a bachelor of arts degree. She then decided to see America and traveled to California, stopping at La Jolla, where she worked in a restaurant as a waitress. After several weeks there, she moved to Los Angeles and enrolled in a drama school. She had leading roles in the Los Angeles stage productions Letters to Lucerne and Brief Music, which won her a 20th Century Fox contract in 1944. After initially playing a bit part in State Fair (1945), she became pregnant and briefly stopped working, only to return a year later as the love interest of the character played by John Wayne in Red River (1948), which was shot in 1946 but held for release until 1948, by which time she had already graduated to leading roles in films noir such as Kiss of Death (1947) opposite Victor Mature and Nightmare Alley (1947) opposite Tyrone Power.
Read more about this topic: Coleen Gray
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or career:
“Love is the hardest thing in the world to write about. So simple. You’ve got to catch it through details, like the early morning sunlight hitting the gray tin of the rain spout in front of her house. The ringing of a telephone that sounds like Beethoven’s “Pastoral.” A letter scribbled on her office stationery that you carry around in your pocket because it smells of all the lilacs in Ohio.”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“The 19-year-old Diana ... decided to make her career that of wife. Today that can be a very, very iffy line of work.... And what sometimes happens to the women who pursue it is the best argument imaginable for teaching girls that they should always be able to take care of themselves.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)