Nan Grey

Blonde American actress Nan Grey (1918-1993) worked for Universal and other studios in the 1930s. She is best remembered for two Deanna Durbin films, Three Smart Girls (1936) and Three Smart Girls Grow Up (1939). She also worked with John Wayne in Sea Spoilers (1936), and with Gloria Jean in The Under-Pup (1939) and A Little Bit of Heaven (1940). After her last film in 1941, she worked for the radio. She abandoned her career when she married singer Frankie Laine in 1950.


Vintage postcard.


British postcard in the Picturegoer Series, London, no. 1140. Photo: Universal.

One of the three Smart Girls

Nan Grey was born Eschal Loleet Grey Miller in 1918 in Houston, Texas. In 1934, at age 16, she went to Hollywood with her mother for a holiday. She was persuaded to take a screen test and ended up in pictures.

Grey attended the school that Universal Studios operated for children who had film contracts. Grey's screen debut (as Nan Gray) was in Warner Bros.'s murder mystery The Firebird (William Dieterle, 1934), starring Verree Teasdale and Ricardo Cortez.

She starred opposite John Wayne in Sea Spoilers (Frank R. Strayer, 1936). Grey also appeared in the Universal Horror films Dracula's Daughter (Lambert Hillyer, 1936) and The Invisible Man Returns (Joe May, 1940), starring Cedric Hardwicke and Vincent Price.

A huge success was the musical comedy Three Smart Girls (Henry Koster, 1936) with Deanna Durbin and Helen Parrish, as well as the sequel Three Smart Girls Grow Up (Henry Koster, 1939).

She also acted in two early Gloria Jean films, The Under-Pup (Richard Wallace, 1939) and A Little Bit of Heaven (Andrew Marton, 1940). Furthermore, Grey was relegated to mostly B movies.


British postcard in the Colourgraph Series, London, no. C 322. Photo: Universal.


British postcard in the Picturegoer Series, London, no. 1275. Photo: Universal. Deanna Durbin, Nan Grey, Helen Parrish and Charles Winninger in Three Smart Girls Grow Up (Henry Koster, 1939).


British postcard in the Film Partners Series, London, no. PC 275. Photo: Universal. Robert Cummings and Nan Grey in Three Smart Girls Grow Up (Henry Koster, 1939).

A cosmetic mirror for nearsighted women

From 1938 to 1945, Nan Grey played Kathy Marshall in the NBC radio soap opera Those We Love'. She also appeared in an episode of The Lux Radio Theatre, 'She Loves Me Not (1937) with Bing Crosby, Joan Blondell, and Sterling Holloway.

In 1939, Grey married U. S. Racing Hall of Fame jockey Jack Westrope in Phoenix, Arizona. Grey began to phase out her film career after her marriage. Her final film was the crime film Under Age (Edward Dmytryk, 1941).

In the 1940s, she switched to radio and theatre. The couple had two daughters, Pam and Jan. The marriage was considered an ideal one in Hollywood, but it ended in a Las Vegas divorce in 1950. Shortly after her divorce, she met singer Frankie Laine at Hollywood’s Cocoanut Grove nightclub. They married in 1950, and Laine adopted her daughters from her marriage to Westrope.

She made one guest appearance on television with Laine in 1960 in an episode of Rawhide, the Western series for which he recorded the theme song. In the 1960s, Grey invented and marketed a cosmetic mirror especially suited to nearsighted women. An obituary noted that among its users was Princess Grace of Monaco.

Nan and her husband Frenkie moved to San Diego in 1968 to indulge in their passion for sportfishing. The union of the Laines lasted 43 years, until her death from heart failure on 25 July 1993, her 75th birthday.


British postcard, no. 1140b. Photo: Universal.


Dutch postcard by J.S.A. Photo: N.V. Holl.-Am. F.B.O. Robert Stack, Gloria Jean and Nan Grey in A Little Bit of Heaven (Andrew Marton, 1940).

Sources: Myrna Oliver (Los Angeles Times), Tom Barrister (IMDb), Wikipedia and IMDb.