How Dawn O’Day Became Anne Shirley

Dawn Evelyn Paris (1918-1993) had two movie careers, the first as child star Dawn O’Day, the second, under the billing of the character she played in Anne of Green Gables (1934), Anne Shirley.

Her screen career began just over a century ago, in Allan Dwan’s The Hidden Woman (1922) starring the notorious Evelyn Nesbitt. Little Dawn had been a photographic model since infancy, and movie work sprang organically from that. She was one of the girls who played Alice in Walt Disney’s animated-live action series of shorts (in Alice’s Egg Plant, 1925), and had roles in lots of other significant films of the silent era, including Riders of the Purple Sage (1925) with Tom Mix, The Callahans and the Murphys (1927) with Marie Dressler and Polly Moran, and the two late Murnau films 4 Devils (1928) and City Girl (1930).

Vitaphone comedy shorts with Lloyd Hamilton were among her earliest talkies: she was in Hello Napoleon and Howdy Mate with the comedian, both in 1931. Early features of the sound era include the first American screen version of Liliom (1930); Edna Ferber’s So Big! (1932) with Barbara Stanwyck; pre-code classic Three on a Match (1932); Rasputin and the Empress (1932) with all three Barrymores; and The Life of Jimmy Dolan (1933).

Anne of Green Gables (1934) elevated her to star status at the age of 16, and thence forth she took on the name of that pivotal character. Subsequent films include Steamboat ‘Round the Bend (1935) with Will Rogers, the 1936 remake of M’liss (1936), and Stella Dallas (1937) with Barbara Stanwyck. She married fellow screen actor John Payne in ’37. Films of the forties included Saturday’s Children (1940) with John Garfield, the Green Gables sequel Anne of Windy Poplars (1940), West Point Widow (1941), The Devil and Dandiel Webster (1941), Four Jacks and a Jill (1942), and several others.

Shirley’s last movie was Raymond Chandler’s Murder My Sweet (1944) where she was third billed behind Dick Powell and Claire Trevor. As you can see, her career had not declined by that point. She merely had no particular drive to act. It was something she had done all her life, and was tired of the life. Having divorced Payne the previous year, she married Adrian Scott, producer of Murder My Sweet, in 1945. The liaison was to be short lived, as Scott was blacklisted as one of the Hollywood Ten. Rather than join him in exile in Europe, she divorced him in 1948 — not one of the Great Moments in Marital History. In 1949 she married Charlie Lederer, nephew of Marion Davies and son of Pipi, who’d spent a good deal of his youth at Hearst Castle. This third marriage lasted until Lederer’s death in 1976.

Shirley’s daughter Julie Payne (1940-2019) was also briefly an actress, mostly a bit player in films, and a guest star on TV shows like The Wild Wild West and The Big Valley. In 1969 she began dating screenwriter Robert Towne (Chinatown, Shampoo, etc), to whom she was married from 1977 through 1982.

For more on silent movies please read  Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube.