The Agony and Ecstasy of Anne Nagel

Good and bad breaks were the portion of actress Anne Nagel (Anna Marie Dolan, 1915-1966), a star of B movies, and something less than a star in major features.

An Irish Catholic girl from Malden, Mass, Nagel attended a convent school with the plan of becoming a nun. She had other aspirations, though, and pursued both modeling and dance once she became a teenager. Her salvation came in the form of her mother’s second husband, a Technicolor technician for Tiffany Pictures named Curtis Nagel. He moved the family to Hollywood. Anne gained her first screen experience appearing in experimental color shorts directed by her stepfather.

Tiffany folded in 1932, so Anne knocked on other doors. Her first feature film credit was as a dancer in Mack Sennett’s Hypnotized (1932), making her, rather wonderfully, one of the last screen actors to have gotten their start in a Sennett comedy. For the next several years, Nagel worked as a chorus girl and bit player in such movies as College Humor (1933), Stand Up and Cheer (1934), George White’s 1935 Scandals, Redheads on Parade (1935), and Polo Joe (1936) with Joe E. Brown.

In 1936, Nagel appeared in a couple of movies with Ross Alexander, who looked to be a rising star for a minute. The pair were married that year. Unfortunately Alexander went into a tailspin when his previous wife committed suicide, and money and career problems started to eat at him. He committed suicide at the start of 1937. (His story is here). During the same period, Nagel had also undergone a surgical operation that made her infertile. The tragedy affected Nagel deeply but she appears to have put the angst into her work. This was the period when she rose to rose to named parts, mostly leads and second leads in B movies, often gritty crime dramas. The circus drama Under the Big Top (1938) is of particular note from this phase.

1940 was definitely Nagel’s peak year without question. She was in a dozen pictures that year, several of them significant ones. She played Casey, the female lead in the serials The Green Hornetand The Green Hornet Strikes Again, played the title role in Irene, was in the horror classics Black Friday and The Invisible Woman, the musical Down Argentine Way, and the comedies My Little Chickadee and Ma, He’s Making Eyes at Me. The hot period lasted a couple of years. She appeared again with W.C. Fields in Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, and three more horror classics with similar names: Man Made Monster (1941), The Mad Doctor of Market Street (1942), and The Mad Monster (1942). She’s also in the comedy Meet the Chump (1941) with Hugh Herbert, and the serials Don Winslow of the Navy (1942), and The Secret Code (1942).

In December, 1941 (just before Pearl Harbor) Nagel married an air force officer. After this, most of her roles were bit parts. She was in but a single film between the years of 1943 and 1945. Some of the later films in which she had walk-ons include Blondie’s Holiday (1947), One Touch of Venus (1948), The Stratton Story (1949) and Mighty Joe Young (1949). She also had a regular role in a series of six RKO shorts (1949-51) starring Flame the Wonder Dog and child actor Gary Gray.

In the early ’50s, Nagel did a little television (The Range Rider, Schlitz Playhouse). She divorced her second husband in 1951 and seems to have spiraled downwards after that. After a five year fallow period, she returned for one last guest shot on Circus Boy (1957). Penury and alcoholism marred her last years. She died of liver cancer in July, 1966 — just three months before The Green Hornet returned to the public’s consciousness as a campy TV show. She was only 50 years old.

For more about show biz historyplease read No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous; for more on classic comedy film, see Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube — now also available on audiobook.