Dorothy Coburn
Dorothy Montana Coburn (June 8, 1905 – May 15, 1978) was an American film actress who appeared in a number of early Laurel and Hardy silents. She was a niece of author Walt Coburn and granddaughter of Robert Coburn Sr., founder of the Circle C Ranch in Montana.[1]
Early years
Coburn was born to cowboy-poet and Western film producer Wallace Coburn and Ann Reifenrath Coburn in Great Falls, Montana but raised in Prescott, Arizona.[1]
Career
Her documented film repertoire consisted of sixteen silent short subjects for the Hal Roach studios, but she also appeared in scores of films as horseback-stuntwoman opposite such stars as Gary Cooper and Joel McCrea, and as a stand-in for Ginger Rogers in several of her dancing films with Fred Astaire.[1] Coburn retired from the movie business in the early 1930s. An accomplished rider and a fit athlete, Coburn also occasionally worked as a stunt performer in westerns. After the advent of sound, she was sometimes engaged as a stand-in for Rogers at RKO.
Later years
After leaving the movie business in 1936, she found employment as a receptionist for an insurance company. She was married twice and died in 1978, aged 72, from emphysema.[1]
She is interred in Grand View Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.[2]
Filmography
- The Battle of the Century (1927)
- Putting Pants on Philip (1927)
- Us (1927)
- Hats Off (1927)
- The Second Hundred Years (1927)
- Sailors, Beware! (1927)
- Sugar Daddies (1927)
- All for Geraldine (1928)
- The Cross Country Bunion Race (1928)
- Do Gentlemen Snore? (1928)
- Look Pleasant (1928)
- That Night (1928)
- Rubber Necks (1928)
- Should Married Men Go Home? (1928)
- Barnum & Ringling, Inc. (1928)
- From Soup to Nuts (1928)
- The Finishing Touch (1928)
- Flying Elephants (1928)
- Leave 'Em Laughing (1928)
- Playin' Hookey (1928)
- Sailor Suits (1929)
- Up and Down Stairs (1930)
- Hot - And How! (1930)
- Shivering Shakespeare (1930)
References
- D'Ambrosio, Brian (2019). Montana Entertainers: Famous and Almost Forgotten. Chicago: Arcadia Publishing Inc. pp. 35–37. ISBN 9781439667330. OCLC 1107577282.
- "Dorothy Heep". The Californian. May 18, 1978. p. 29.