Career
Born Ina Fagan in 1893 in Washington, D.C., Claire began her career appearing in vaudeville. She performed on Broadway in the musicals Jumping Jupiter and The Quaker Girl (both 1911) and Lady Luxury, and starred on Broadway in plays by some of the leading comic dramatists of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, including the roles of Jerry Lamarr in Avery Hopwood's The Gold Diggers (1919), Mrs. Cheyney in Frederick Lonsdale's The Last of Mrs. Cheyney (1925), Lady George Grayston in W. Somerset Maugham's Our Betters (1928), and Enid Fuller in George Kelly's Fatal Weakness.
Her last stage appearance was as Lady Elizabeth Mulhammer in T. S. Eliot's The Confidential Clerk (1954). She was particularly identified with the high comedies of S. N. Behrman, and created the female leads in three of his plays: Biography (1934), End of Summer (1936), and The Talley Method (1941). Behrman wrote of Claire's performance in one of Behrman's comedies: "Her readings were translucent, her stage presence encompassing. The flick of an intonation deflated pomposity. She never missed a nuance." Critic J. Brooks Atkinson praised Claire for her "refulgent comic intelligence. In films, she is best known as the Grand Duchess in the 1939 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer political satire Ninotchka directed by Ernst Lubitsch and starring Greta Garbo.
She made her onscreen debut in the Cecil B. DeMille film The Wild Goose Chase in 1915.
Read more about this topic: Ina Claire
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