A gentle actress with the gift of finding poetry in everyday behavior, Dorothy McGuire played many quietly enchanting characters in her five decades as a film actress. So consistently fine that she was somewhat taken for granted, McGuire was a solid favorite with audiences but usually ignored when awards were handed out. Only once, for her thoughtful performance as a young woman struggling with prejudice in Gentleman's Agreement (1947), was she nominated for an Academy Award.

Born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1916, McGuire made her stage debut as a teen-ager in an Omaha Community Playhouse in a production of A Kiss for Cinderella that starred famous alumnus Henry Fonda. She understudied, and eventually replaced, Martha Scott in the original Broadway production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. After several other stage appearances she won the title role in Claudia, scoring such a triumph that she was asked to repeat her performance as a naive young wife in the 1943 movie version. It proved such a delightful film debut that McGuire and costar Robert Young also starred in a sequel, Claudia and David (1946).

Playing a mute servant threatened by a serial killer in The Spiral Staircase (1945), McGuire projects a vivid range of emotions without benefit of spoken dialogue. She was reteamed with Young for the fantasy/romance The Enchanted Cottage (1945), in which they play a couple transformed by love. I Want You (1951) casts McGuire as the wife of a World War II veteran (Dana Andrews) who resents his plans to re-enlist during the Korean War. In Invitation (1952), she touchingly plays a wealthy young woman who is expected to die soon, with Van Johnson as her fortune-hunting lover.

Other notable entries in McGuire's filmography include Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), Old Yeller (1957), A Summer Place (1959) and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1960). She was a luminous Virgin Mary in George Stevens' all-star Biblical epic The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965). From 1970 to 1990, she worked mostly in television, with occasional forays onto the stage. McGuire, who died in 2001, was married to John Swope, an airline founder and photographer for Life magazine, until his death in 1979. They had two children.

by Roger Fristoe