Actress best known as a sultry singer in The Caine Mutiny
MAY WYNN, who has died aged 93, was an actress, singer and dancer who was, perhaps, the only film star to be renamed after one of her characters.
In Edward Dmytryk’s The Caine Mutiny (1954), starring Humphrey Bogart, Donna Hickey played May Wynn, a sultry nightclub artiste (although her singing voice was dubbed by Jo Ann Greer). The studio mogul Harry Cohn was so impressed that he had her adopt her character’s name. “I finally thought I had made it in Hollywood,” she recalled. “I wanted to be the next Lana Turner.”
Donna Lee Hickey was born to vaudevillians in New York on January 8 1928. She followed her parents into show business, dancing in nightclubs across New York before being given a residence at the Copacabana Club aged 16.
“Some of the girls had a great desire to try their luck in Hollywood,” she said in 2010. “I was one of them. However, the little men who’d come by the Copacabana on the promise of something from the girls in exchange for a screen test overlooked me. I was young and awkward. In hindsight I had a lucky escape.”
She was later crowned Miss American Legion, Miss Miami Beach and Queen of the New York Press Photographers Ball.
In 1950 she was introduced by a New York talent scout to William Gordon, a casting director at 20th Century Fox, but she made her screen debut at MGM the following year in the Esther Williams musical Skirts Ahoy!
When the 20th Century Fox mogul Darryl Zanuck spotted her on screen, he personally oversaw a lucrative six-month contract. But, she recalled: “I was miserable at Fox. Every week I’d hail a taxi go to the lot, pick up my salary cheque and then home again with no work to speak of aside from little bit parts.”
She was tested by Columbia for the role of Lorene in From Here to Eternity (1953), but she lost out to Donna Reed, who won an Oscar for her performance. Distraught at being overlooked, Donna Hickey joined a trip to entertain the troops in Korea.
On her return, at the beginning of 1953, she received a telephone call from the producer Stanley Kramer, who thought she
would be perfect as May Wynn in The Caine Mutiny.
Following its success, and now going by the name of her character in the film, she had roles on television and featured in two Westerns, They Rode West (1954) and Rough Company (1955), as well as in B-grade fare such as The White Squaw (1956), and The Man Is Armed (also 1956) for the “poverty row” studio Republic.
May Wynn began dating Robert Francis, one of her Caine Mutiny co-stars, but he was killed in July 1955 when his plane crashed approaching Burbank airport. She was subsequently linked to Peter Lawford and Frank Sinatra, then in 1956 she married the actor Jack Kelly. She followed him to the Far East, where he was filming Hong Kong Affair (1958), and was given the role of Chu Lan after the intended local actress turned out not to speak English.
May Wynn called it a day during the early 1960s, but not before running a film company, Majak Productions (from “May” and “Jack”), which she formed with Kelly. For 28 years she taught handwriting and public speaking at Our Lady Queen of Angels Catholic school in Newport Beach, and also worked in real estate.
She lived in contented obscurity until 2003, when she turned up at a Hollywood autograph show complete with a stack of
8 x 10 portrait shots which she happily sold to film fans.
May Wynn divorced Jack Kelly in 1962 and married a fellow realtor, Jack Custer, in 1968. They divorced in 1979.
May Wynn, born January 8 1928, died March 23 2021