Jean Muir

Pretty Jean Muir in a dreamy profile view for the 1934 film DR MONICA. Muir was born in Suffern, New York, as Jean Muir Fullarton on February 13, 1911. She was signed by Warner Bros. in 1933 and made 14 films in her first three years there. She played opposite several famous actors including Warren William, Paul Muni, Richard Barthelmess and Franchot Tone, but she returned to Broadway in 1937 because she was unsatisfied with the roles. Muir incurred the disfavour of studio executives because of her involvement in formation of the Screen Actors Guild, her tendency to question the way the film business operated, and her resistance to posing for publicity photographs. Disappointed at never being given a strong movie part, she quit films in 1943 and moved to radio, TV and stage work. In 1950 Muir was named as a Communist sympathizer by the notorious pamphlet Red Channels, and immediately removed from the cast of the television sitcom The Aldrich Family, in which she had been cast as Mrs. Aldrich. Muir was the first performer to be deprived of employment because of a listing in Red Channels. The apparent cause of the accusation was her six-month membership in the Congress of American Women, which federal authorities considered a subversive group. Muir resumed acting in 1958, appearing in an episode of Matinee Theater on NBC-TV. In the mid-1950s she reportedly suffered from alcoholism and cirrhosis of the liver. In later years she taught drama in community playhouses and summer drama schools. Muir died in a nursing home in Mesa, Arizona on July 23, 1996.

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