Twelvetrees, Helen (c. 1908–1958)

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Twelvetrees, Helen (c. 1908–1958)

American actress. Born Helen Marie Jurgens on December 25, 1908 (some sources cite 1907), in Brooklyn, New York; died of a drug overdose on February 13, 1958, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; daughter of William Jurgens (in advertising) and Helen (Kelly) Jurgens; educated at Brooklyn Academy; trained for the stage at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts; married Clark Twelvetrees (an actor, divorced); married Jack Woody (a realtor, divorced 1936); married Conrad Payne (an Air Force officer), around 1946; children: (second marriage) Jack Bryan (b. 1932).

Selected filmography:

The Ghost Talks (1929); Blue Skies (1929); Words and Music (1929); The Grand Parade (1930); Swing High (1930); Her Man (1930); The Cat Creeps (1930); The Painted Desert (1931); Millie (1931); A Woman of Experience (1931); Bad Company (1931); Panama Flo (1932); Young Bride (originally titled Love Starved, 1932); State's Attorney (1932); Is My Face Red? (1932); Unashamed (1932); A Bedtime Story (1933); Disgraced (1933); My Woman (1933); King for a Night (1933); All Men Are Enemies (1934); Now I'll Tell (1934); She Was a Lady (1934); One Hour Late (1934); Times Square Lady (1935); She Gets Her Man (1935); The Spanish Cape Mystery (1935); Frisco Waterfront (1935); Thoroughbred (1936); Hollywood Roundup (1937); Persons in Hiding (1939); Unmarried (1939).

Helen Twelvetrees was born Helen Marie Jurgens on Christmas Day, probably in 1908 to a mother who encouraged her interest in music and art. When Helen decided she wanted to act after graduating from high school, her mother urged her to postpone that plan for a year to study drawing and painting at the Art Students' Union. She was chosen as a model by several well-known illustrators of magazine covers during that year, and ended it more resolved than ever to embark on an acting career.

Helen next spent three months at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where she met Clark Twelvetrees, a fellow student whom she married. They both appeared in one of the school plays and were offered jobs by Stuart Walker, owner of the Indianapolis Stock Company. The couple honeymooned by commuting between Indianapolis and Cincinnati, performing plays in Walker theaters—a period later described by Twelvetrees as the unhappiest of her life. They returned to New York after three months to look for work. Twelvetrees was chosen by Horace Liveright to play Sondra in an adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, then appeared in two unsuccessful plays, Yen by Charles Ray and Roulette by Leon DeCosta. While she was rehearsing for an adaptation of Sinclair Lewis' Elmer Gantry, a representative from Fox saw her and asked her to join the roster of new actors needed for movies with sound. She accepted the offer, leaving the Elmer Gantry cast before the play opened. At a party given in her honor by the cast members, her husband jumped or fell from a sixth-floor window, landing on the canvas top of a parked car below. Twelvetrees postponed her trip to California until he was well enough to come with her. However, their relationship deteriorated as her

career blossomed and his declined. When she was signed by Fox, he left for New York, and they divorced soon after. The day the divorce was decreed, she married Jack Woody, a realtor, at Rio Del Mar, California. Their son, Jack Bryan Woody, was born in 1932.

Twelvetrees made only three undistinguished films for Fox before signing with Pathé, where her film career began to flourish, although her first two pictures were panned by critics. Her third film for Pathé, Her Man, began to establish her as a respected actress. According to Dion McGregor in Film Fan Monthly, the critics decided that "in this film she went a long way toward conquering her main fault: a tendency to exaggerate gestures." Based on the song "Frankie and Johnny," the film was set in a Havana waterfront dive and was the first in a series of what McGregor called "tart-with-a-heart" roles for Twelvetrees. Her Man was a box-office hit.

In Millie, the most important role of her career, she played a young, disillusioned woman who not only becomes a golddigger in order to support her daughter, but eventually kills the man who attempts to seduce that daughter. Her portrayal of Millie, from an innocent girl to a woman of the world in her 40s, was dramatic and convincing. Twelvetrees appeared in a number of Pathé films, usually as an innocent woman who is enticed into wrongdoing. In 1933, she moved to Paramount Studios, but also did films for Columbia, Universal, and Fox over the next several years. One of her more memorable roles during this period was opposite Spencer Tracy as a gentle, wronged wife in 1934's Now I'll Tell.

In 1936, Twelvetrees went to Australia, where her role in Thoroughbred made her the first American star of the "talkies" to film there. The attention she received in Australia was a welcome respite during a low point in her life, both professionally and personally. After she returned home, she divorced Woody, claiming that he was unemployed and living off her earnings. She filmed her last two pictures with Paramount in 1939, and then returned to the stage, where over the years she appeared in several plays, including Arsenic and Old Lace, A Streetcar Named Desire, and The Man Who Came to Dinner. It was during her European tour in the latter role that she met her third husband Conrad Payne, an Air Force officer.

Twelvetrees died in 1958, at the hospital at Olmstead Air Force Base near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, of an overdose of sleeping pills; the death was ruled a suicide. She had been suspected of being an alcoholic for many years, and also had a painful kidney ailment; according to McGregor, she may have taken the pills to find relief from her pain.