by Hal Erickson
biography
The niece of character actress Fay Bainter, Dorothy Burgess was a professional dancer in her mid-teens and a Broadway leading lady at 17. She made her film bow in the early talkie western In Old Arizona (1929), playing the double-dealing Mexican paramour of the roguish Cisco Kid (Warner Baxter). While she continued working in the major studios throughout the 1930s, Dorothy's bid for screen stardom never really took hold. After 1935's The Village Tale, Dorothy Burgess returned to the stage, infrequently accepting character roles in such lower-berth programmers as Universal's I Want a Divorce (1940) and PRC's Girls in Chains (1943).
