Obituary

Helen Vinson

Hollywood actress fated to play the 'other woman'

In the Hollywood lexicon, "the other man" was often a dullard whom the heroine leaves for a more exciting beau, while "the other woman" was a superficially more attractive woman with whom the hero dallies before returning to the good girl he really loves. Both roles were not terribly rewarding because they tended to typecast the actors and get them low billing, yet one of the most convincing of "other women" was the tall, slender, cool blonde Helen Vinson, who has died aged 92.

However, among her two dozen or so films, her most outstanding role was in a film where she didn't play the other woman, Mervyn LeRoy's I Am A Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932). An uncompromising look at the treatment of criminals in a southern state's prison system following the first world war, Vinson personified the only ray of hope for escaped convict Paul Muni. In the celebrated final scene, Muni emerges from hiding in the shadows for a brief farewell to his girlfriend.

"Forgive me, Helen. I had to take a chance to see you tonight. Just to say good-bye," he says. She looks at him with intense suffering and pity on her face.

"I can't let you go like this! Can't you tell me where you're going?" she asks. "Will you write? Do you need any money? How do you live?"

"I steal!", he whispers as he vanishes into the dark.

After that, it was Vinson who did some stealing, both of husbands and scenes. As Lola Starr in Grand Slam (1933), she tries to lure bridge champion Paul Lukas away from Loretta Young, his wife and playing partner. In The Power And The Glory (1933), a precursor of Citizen Kane, with its story of a millionaire (Spencer Tracy) told in a series of unchronological flashbacks, Vinson as the mistress is the cause of the protagonist's suicide when she has an affair with his son.

Among her other unsympathetic roles was the uppercrust wife in Frank Capra's Broadway Bill (1934) whom Warner Baxter leaves for the racehorse of the title; the cold selfish wife of John Boles in The Life Of Vergie Winters (1934), and as another mistress, driving her lover's wife insane in Private Worlds (1935).

Vinson's own love life was less melodramatic, although it did have its fair share of drama. Born Helen Rulfs in Texas, the daughter of an oil company executive, she eloped at 18 with a carpet manufacturer called Harry N Vickerman.

In 1933, a year after being offered a Warner Bros contract, she divorced Vickerman, who disapproved of her show business friends. In 1935 she married British tennis champion Fred Perry, and settled in England. She made a few British films, including Transatlantic Tunnel (1936), a science fiction tale, in which Vinson tries to seduce the married architect of the preposterous title scheme.

After she and Perry moved to Hollywood, Vinson, in the Technicolour Vogues Of 1938, wearing a string of gorgeous gowns, played the egotistic wife of a couturier (Warner Baxter), who wants him to back her in a show.

Unfortunately for Vinson, in her real life marriage the "other woman" turned out to be Marlene Dietrich. Following her divorce in 1938, Vinson married wealthy New York socialite Donald Hardenbrook. Before retiring to lead the life of a high-society hostess, she appeared in Torrid Zone (1940) in which she vied with Ann Sheridan over James Cagney - but cast as the other woman, she lost out again.

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