Claire Bren, Oscar Winner, Arts Patron, Dies at 90

Academy Award-winning actress Claire Trevor Bren, a star of such silver screen classics as “Key Largo,” “Stagecoach” and more than 60 other films, died Saturday at a hospital near her Newport Beach home. A family spokesman said she was 90.

In recent years, Bren--who won an Oscar for her 1948 supporting role in “Key Largo” as gangster Edward G. Robinson’s alcoholic moll--had become a generous philanthropist and patron of the arts in Orange County. Last year, she donated $500,000 for the renovation of UC Irvine’s student theater, which was renamed in her honor.

Stepmother to billionaire developer Donald Bren and friend to Hollywood icons John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart, Claire Trevor Bren’s private life diverged sharply from the hard-bitten but vulnerable outcasts she excelled at portraying on the screen.

“Claire was a special woman whose lifelong passion was to bring joy to others,” said Donald Bren, chairman of the Irvine Co., in a statement after her death. “We will all miss her. She was a great lady.”

As Claire Trevor, Bren earned her place in movie history playing women with tarnished reputations, from her role as a frontier prostitute in “Stagecoach” alongside Wayne to her performance as the worn streetwalker in “Dead End” with Humphrey Bogart.

She not only enjoyed a Hollywood career spanning more than five decades, but performed in hundreds of radio and television shows--including an Emmy-winning role in “Dodsworth.” She retired from acting in 1987.

“Claire Trevor was a consummate professional who may well have never given a bad performance,” said Kevin Thomas, a Times film writer. “She was often cast as a shady lady but was always able to reveal vulnerability beneath a tough veneer.

“Especially memorable,” Thomas added, “was her rich widow in ‘Murder, My Sweet,’ because she was able to show the hardhearted gold digger beneath the grande dame airs.”

Bren is probably best known for her dramatic scene in “Key Largo” when Robinson, playing her sadistic boyfriend, forces her to croak out “Moanin’ Low” in return for the drink she so desperately craves. And when Robinson coldly refuses her the drink, “because you were rotten,” a latter-day critic wrote, “the sense of humiliation is heartbreaking.”

With a voice once described as sounding like delicious trouble, Bren was one of the most sought-after supporting actresses during the 1930s and ‘40s, working for legendary directors John Ford, John Huston, William Wyler and Raoul Walsh.

She continued to receive movie offers well after her retirement, including one last year, according to Richard Elbaum, a family spokesman. But the sultry-voiced actress also earned a reputation as an unpretentious family woman who placed personal happiness above her career.

“I don’t think female movie stars have particularly happy lives,” Bren told The Times in 1982. “I rather doubt that Bette Davis or Katharine Hepburn had happy lives. . . . But I am sure about myself: I had a happy life; 90% of my thoughts were not directed to career.”

Claire Wemlinger was born in New York City--movie buffs disagree on whether it was in 1909 or 1910--to a Belfast-born mother and a strict Paris-born father who had a custom tailor shop on 5th Avenue.

As a child, she dreamed of being a ballerina. But along the way she become involved in school and church plays and fell in love with the stage.

After studying art briefly at Columbia University, she attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. She had to drop out after six months, though, because her father’s business failed during the Depression, and he told her that she would have to help out.

“That shocked the hell out of me,” she later recalled. “We weren’t rich, but I never thought of money as being a worry, so it scared me. I thought, ‘What do I know how to do? Acting is the only thing I know how to do,’ and to get a job in the middle of the Depression in New York was not easy.”

At the age of 21, she made her Broadway debut. She arrived in Hollywood two years later in 1933, at a time when the film capital was at its most glamorous. She signed a five-year contract with 20th Century Fox and made one picture after another, most of them with 18-day shooting schedules.

“I worked like a demon, and I knew it was a job,” she said later, recalling the then-standard six-day workweek. “Saturday night you never could plan on going out to dinner because we’d break for dinner for one hour and work till 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 in the morning.”

But there was also fun to be had in the Hollywood of the 1930s.

She had her first taste of vodka at an intimate gathering for Polish-born concert pianist Artur Rubinstein. At another party, she was so mesmerized at meeting the great Greta Garbo that she could do little more than say, “How do you do?” and stare at that fabulous face.

She once played hearts with “The Front Page” writers Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur all the way to New York on the Super Chief passenger train--and won every game. “They were furious,” she later told The Times.

Her first motion picture after her Fox contract ended was “Stagecoach,” and she received top billing over Wayne--then a B-western cowboy hero--in his star-making role.

She ended up making four pictures with Wayne, including 1954’s “The High and the Mighty,” for which she received another Oscar nomination. The two became close friends and neighbors after Wayne bought a home in Newport Beach just a few minutes away.

The true love of her life, however, was Milton Bren. A onetime Hollywood agent, he produced “Topper,” starring Cary Grant, helped develop the Sunset Strip and won the first Newport-Ensenada International Yacht Race.

At the time of their marriage in 1948, she was twice divorced and had one son, Charles. Bren also was divorced and had two sons, Donald and Peter. All three young sons lived with the newlyweds.

“We were an instant family,” she recalled in 1995. “I raised both boys. They’re like my own.”

Claire Bren’s life was struck by tragedy in the late 1970s.

In 1978, her son Charles was among 144 people killed in an airplane collision over San Diego. In 1979, her husband of 31 years died of a brain tumor.

Bren later told The Times that losing her husband “was the biggest loss except for our son, who was killed. That was something you never get over. But losing my husband left me without anybody. I mean, I felt completely alone.”

Later in life, she pursued an avocation of oil painting and continued supporting charitable causes, including the March of Dimes and the Arthritis Foundation.

During the 1970s, she served as campaign chairman of the Orange County Arthritis Foundation and was a fixture at charity events. But she later avoided working on committees, preferring to keep a relatively low social profile.

Her 1999 contribution to UC Irvine’s Village Theatre allowed the university to launch an expensive renovation of the 30-year-old playhouse where students stage plays, concerts and dance performances for the public.

“I believe in young people today,” she said after announcing her donation, “and the theater is one place to develop your imagination.”

In addition to money, Bren also offered her time to the university’s budding actors and actresses, some of whom dreamed of Hollywood fame.

“For a big star, she was amazingly humble,” said UC Irvine Chancellor Ralph J. Cicerone. The students “really liked her advice. It was a two-way relationship. She gave tips and support and she enjoyed working with them.”

Bren, who suffered respiratory problems for at least the last six months, was the antithesis of Hollywood pretentiousness, said Marion Knott Montapert, a longtime friend.

“She was beautiful, inside and not just out,” said Montapert, who knew Bren for more than 30 years. “It certainly was the passing of a beautiful person, a wonderful friend.”

“In addition to her love of the arts, she was devoted to her family and friends,” said stepson Peter Bren, a New York-based real estate investor.

Claire Bren told the Times in a 1995 interview that she had no intention of writing her autobiography, despite a stellar potential cast of characters.

“Listen, it would take me the rest of my life to write,” she said. “It would be a wonderful story because it’s a happy story, but I hate looking back.”

Funeral services will be private, and a memorial service was being planned.