Carroll McComas


Carroll McComas was an American stage, film, and television actress.

Biography

She was the daughter of Judge C. C. McComas and wife Ellen Moore.
McComas began acting while still in her teens, playing more than two dozen roles on the Broadway stage. In 1918, she played May Barber in the Princess Theatre musical Oh, Lady! Lady!! by Jerome Kern, Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse. Her greatest personal stage triumphs were as the title character in Miss Lulu Bett, by Zona Gale, in the 1920–21 season and as Roxane in Cyrano de Bergerac in the 1923–24 season. Her last Broadway role was in 1950 as Catherine Petkoff in Arms and the Man.
Her film roles were few and far between. She made her silent movie debut in 1916 in When Love Is King, a still extant film. Her second and last silent film came in 1920 in Jack Straw directed by William C. deMille and based on a 1908 stage play W. Somerset Maugham that starred John Drew, Jr. and Mary Boland. This movie still survives.
McComas interrupted her acting career after marrying Selskar M Gunn, Vice President of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1933. Gunn died in 1944 and McComas returned to the stage in 1950 and to film in 1953 to play a supporting role in Jamaica Run where she appeared as the mother of Wendell Corey and Arlene Dahl. She then appeared steadily in television roles through the 1950s.

Partial filmography