The Two Claire (Clare) Luces
During the Golden Age, there were two prominent women in New York with nearly identical names: Claire Luce, an actress, and Clare Boothe Luce, at various times a journalist, magazine editor, playwright, congresswoman, and diplomat. Their lives spanned a nearly identical period, too. Both were attractive blondes with talent and ambition who worked hard for the success they achieved.
Left: Clare Boothe Luce, ca. 1920s. Right: Claire Luce, ca. 1920s.
Part 1: Claire Luce Claire Luce the actress (born Claire McGill, 1903–1989) began her career in musicals, rising to starring roles for Ziegfeld by the late 1920s.
Fred Astaire and Claire Luce in Gay Divorce, ca. 1932-34
From 1932-34 she co-starred with Fred Astaire in the Cole Porter musical Gay Divorce in both New York and London. Astaire later wrote of her, “Claire was a beautiful dancer and it was her style that suggested to me the whole pattern of the ‘Night and Day’ dance. This was something entirely different from anything Adele and I had done together. That was what I wanted, an entirely new dancing approach.“ Unfortunately, she sustained a serious injury during the London run and was unable to appear in the movie version (renamed The Gay Divorcee), as Astaire had wanted. The role went to Ginger Rogers instead.
Fred Astaire, Erik Rhodes, and Claire Luce in Gay Divorce
She was also an accomplished dramatic actress who was praised for her performance in a stage version of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men in 1937. After its London run in 1939, she remained in Britain during the war, acting many Shakespeare roles. She was the first American actress to play leading roles at the Stratford-on-Avon Memorial Theatre’s summer Shakespeare Festival. In 1945 she played Viola, Mistress Ford, Beatrice, and, to particular acclaim, Cleopatra.
Left: As Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair in London, 1946. Right: As Cleopatra in Stratford-on-Avon
Her filmography is short. She co-starred with Humphrey Bogart and Spencer Tracy in John Ford’s Up the River (1930) and with Ian Hunter in Michael Powell’s Lazybones (1935). Her TV work included Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair (1949), a role she had played on the London stage three years earlier, and Ibsen’s Peer Gynt with Douglass Montgomery (1952).
With Spencer Tracy and Humphrey Bogart in Up the River (1930)
Although she was married briefly to an American millionaire, she had a long roster of lovers, including Florenz Ziegfeld, George S. Kaufman, Winston Churchill’s son Randolph, and composer William Walton.
