Claudia Dell

She studied acting in New York City at the Academy and singing at the Juilliard School. Soon she was sent to London to play the lead in a musical comedy, Mary Mary. The play's run lasted one year. While in England, scouts from Warner Brothers noticed her and asked her to come to Hollywood. She returned to New York along with her aunt following a tour of southern Europe. Claudia became homesick, rejected leads offered her in two stage productions and moved to Los Angeles, California, where her family was living.

Dell made her screen debut following an interlude of three months after coming west. She was given a contract by Warner Bros. to star in a number of musical pictures. She played the title role in a lavish Technicolor musical film, Sweet Kitty Bellairs (1930). Her next role was in another important musical, co-starring with Al Jolson in Big Boy (1930). Unfortunately, late in 1930, due to the beginning of the Great Depression, the public had grown weary of musicals. Warner Brothers, however, had already begun to film two other musicals (which would be released in 1931) in which Dell was given a leading role. The first of these was another lavish Technicolor production entitled Fifty Million Frenchmen. In the second film, Sit Tight (1931), she played the love interest of Paul Gregory, another musical star. Read Less

Previously, she had worked 12 years as director of the John Robert Powers School in Beverly Hills, California. Claudia commented about her new position, "There is no better work than being able to be associated with a school which helps mold young people for the future and one that gives a whole new dimension to a woman's life."

In the early 1970s Dell had a syndicated radio program that aired in the Midwest called The Claudia Dell Show. Read Less