by Hal Erickson
biography
Blonde leading lady Claire Dodd came to Hollywood by way of Broadway's Ziegfeld Follies. In films since 1930, Claire was for several years an employee of Warner Bros., where she played many a scheming seductress. She projected a more likeable, down-to-earth image as Della Street in a brace of Warners' "Perry Mason" movies, The Case of the Curious Bride (1935) and The Case of the Lucky Legs (1936)--actually marrying lawyer Mason (Warren William) in the latter film. Claire Dodd's last Hollywood years were spent at Universal Pictures in the early 1940s, where she played pleasant but colorless heroines; in one such assignment, Abbott and Costello's In the Navy (1941), Claire was reunited with her old Warners colleague Dick Powell.
