Although she remained mostly in the "leading lady" category, Ann Sheridan had all the makings of a superstar -- beauty, talent, sex appeal and a definite, glamorous personality. Warner Bros., her home studio in the 1940s, dubbed her the "Oomph Girl" and tried for a time to make her their answer to Betty Grable at Fox and Rita Hayworth at Columbia. But Sheridan seemed too sensible and knowing to be comfortable as a mere pinup or one-dimensional musical star and found her niche in earthy melodramas and comedies.

She was born Clara Lou Sheridan in Denton, Texas, in 1915, and while in college won a beauty contest with a prize that included a role in a racy little Paramount movie called Search for Beauty (1934). She signed with Paramount, but after being cast in thankless roles, many of them uncredited, switched to Warners in 1936. Her luck didn't change until she played James Cagney's girlfriend in Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) and audiences responded to this pretty, assured, rather droll redhead. She got top billing in Naughty But Nice (1939), which carried the tagline, "The Oomph Girl's Greatest Tri-Oomph!"

Sheridan, one of the few actresses strong enough to hold her own with Cagney, was reunited with him in Torrid Zone (1940), in which he's the manager of a plantation in Central America and she's a wisecracking nightclub singer; and City for Conquest (1940), in which they are Lower East Side sweethearts separated by their own ambitions. Again cast as a nightclub entertainer, she spars with Humphrey Bogart in It All Came True (1940).

1942 brought Sheridan some of her best roles including Randy Monaghan, the feisty heroine of the very successful Kings Row (1942); Lorraine Sheldon, the flamboyant actress of The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942); Lola Mears, the title character of Juke Girl (1942); Roma, the ex-wife of aircraft-plant worker Jack Carson in the WWII romance Wings for the Eagle (1942); and Connie Fuller, the New York City wife who insists upon fixing up a house in the country in George Washington Slept Here (1942). Since the latter film had Jack Benny as the husband, it was an acid test of Sheridan's comic timing - one she passed with flying colors.

In Shine on Harvest Moon (1944), playing real-life entertainer Nora Bayes, Sheridan gets to show off her warm contralto singing voice. One More Tomorrow (1946) is a remake of 1932's The Animal Kingdom, based on the Philip Barry stage comedy, with Sheridan as the beauty who regrets turning down a marriage proposal from playboy Dennis Morgan. The Unfaithful (1947) is also a remake -- of the 1940 Bette Davis vehicle The Letter, with Sheridan in the juicy role of the woman who shoots her ex-lover. Nora Prentiss (1947) offers more flamboyant melodrama as Sheridan enacts the role of a singer whose affair with a married man leads to a bizarre series of events.

Sheridan's contract with Warner Bros. ended in 1948 and she started off her free-lance career with a double bang in the comedies Good Sam (1948) and I Was a Male War Bride (1949), deliciously playing the wives of, respectively, Gary Cooper and Cary Grant. After that, good roles became scarce, although she gave fine performances in two minor films, Universal's Take Me to Town (1953, directed by Douglas Sirk) and Republic's Come Next Spring (1956).

Sheridan's final two films were MGM's The Opposite Sex (1956), a musicalization of the 1939 The Women, which cast her as the heroine's best friend; and Woman and the Hunter (1957), a British-made safari adventure co-starring David Farrar. She turned to the stage and to television, where she was active until her death from cancer in 1967, making frequent guest appearances and starring in two series, the daytime soap opera Another World (1965-66) and the popular Western sitcom Pistols and Petticoats (1966-67).

Sheridan had three husbands, all actors: Edward Norris, George Brent and Scott McKay.

by Roger Fristoe