ObituaryIrene Hervey obituary
In and out of the movies
Irene Hervey, who has died aged 78, was the pure girl who won the heart of mild-mannered sheriff James Stewart over wild-cat dance-hall girl Marlene Dietrich in the classic George Marshall 1939 comedy western Destry Rides Again. The pretty, dimpled Hervey seemed destined to be overshadowed by bigger stars in some of her more prestigious films and to languish in dozens of B-movies. She suffered both from a lack of ambition and an overweening Christian Scientist mother.
Born Irene Herwick in Los Angeles, the daughter of a sign painter, she married a musician while still in her teens. Divorced after a few years, and with a baby to support, she was given a screen test at MGM. Her promising film debut was in The Stranger’s Return (1933), King Vidor’s study of rural life. However, her role as the long-suffering wife of philandering farmer Franchot Tone gave her no ammunition to compete with the star, Miriam Hopkins.
She had a better chance to shine on loan to 20th Century-Fox in Charlie Chan In Shanghai (1935), cheerfully helping the oriental detective catch opium smugglers. Back at MGM, she provided some romance for fugitive gunman Chester Morris in the third of four versions of Three Godfathers (1936). In the same year, after having been engaged briefly to Robert Taylor, she met the handsome singer Allan Jones, who was riding high at MGM as the star of Showboat and Rose Marie. Their son, Jack Jones, was born in 1938, and became even more famous than his parents.
When her husband moved over to Universal, Hervey managed to get a contract at the same studio, although the couple only co-starred once, in The Boys From Syracuse (1940), in which they sang Rogers and Hart’s Falling In Love With Love together. In 1943, Hervey was seriously injured in a car crash, and her career was put on hold for five years. She returned to the screen as the sophisticated wife of William Powell in Mr Peabody and the Mermaid . In The Lucky Stiff (1949) she again had to compete with bigger stars such as Dorothy Lamour and Claire Trevor.
There was no such rivalry on television in the 1950s, where she was able to make a reputation in better roles. Hervey, who divorced Allan Jones in 1957, appeared in the series Perry Mason, Dr Kildare, My Three Sons and Ironside. Her last two movies were Cactus Flower (1969) and Clint Eastwood’s Play Misty for Me (1971) . Later she got a job with a travel firm, which enabled her to attend many of her son’s nightclub shows around the world.
Irene Hervey, film actress; born July 11, 1910; died December 20, 1998
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