June Travis | Film | The Guardian

Obituary

June Travis

B-movie regular who shone in one star role

The glory days of the Hollywood double feature were from the mid-1930s to the mid-40s, when both the major and poverty row studios were turning out B-movies at an astonishing rate. Each studio had its roster of second-division players. One such actor was June Travis, a petite and spirited brunette who appeared in 30 movies in the three years from 1935, though she remains now just a faint, fond memory in the minds of only ardent cinema buffs.

Travis, who has died aged 93, was signed by Warner Bros in 1935, the year the studio increased its B-movie output from 12% to 50%. She played opposite a number of B-movie action heroes, such as Dick Purcell, Dick Foran, Ricardo Cortez, Robert Livingston and Ronald Reagan, with whom she co-starred in his first film, Love is on the Air (1937), and who became a good friend. However, she did have an opportunity to star in a higher-ranking picture, Howard Hawks' Ceiling Zero (1936), third billed behind James Cagney and Pat O'Brien.

Travis played "Tommy" Thomas, a young aviatrix with whom Cagney falls in love, an event that leads to his neglecting his duty and to the death of a fellow pilot. In preparation for her role, Travis was taught to fly, navigate and parachute jump by aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart. She was so appealing in the role that it is puzzling that she was never offered further star parts.

Many years later, she declared that if she had stayed at Warners for another two years, instead of retiring in 1938, she would have become a star of the first rank. This is not as self-delusional as it sounds. Had fellow Warner Bros contract player Humphrey Bogart quit in 1939, after more than 30 films, he might well have been remembered vaguely as a mere second-string heavy.

Travis was born June Dorothea Grabiner in Chicago, the daughter of Harry Grabiner, who was then vice-president of the famed baseball team, the Chicago White Sox. After studying at the University of California and the University of Illinois, she was noticed by a studio talent scout in Miami while watching the White Sox in spring training.

In the eight films she made in her first year at Warner Bros, she had bit parts, but in William Dieterle's Dr Socrates (1935), Travis played a gangster's moll. During the following three years, she was the female lead in numerous cheaply and rapidly made movies whose appeal today lies more in the nostalgia factor than any intrinsic artistic value.

But Travis always proved herself a good sport, whether co-starring with Joe E Brown in Earthworm Tractors (1936) and The Gladiator (1938) - the cavern-mouthed comedian was a passionate baseball fan and friend of her father's - or as Perry Mason's assistant, Della Street, in The Case of the Black Cat (1936), or proving that "dames and fighting don't mix" in The Kid Comes Back (1938).

In 1940, having retreated from life in Hollywood, of which she later commented, "I don't remember that it was such a ball," Travis married Chicago businessman Fred Friedlob. But she still acted in Chicago-area theatres and summer stock on the east coast, notably as Goneril in King Lear, and playing Douglas Fairbanks Jr's ex-wife in The Pleasure of His Company. Travis was tempted back to films only twice more: in the Bette Davis vehicle The Star, playing the level-headed wife of Davis's despairing agent, and Monster A Go-Go (1965), a cheap horror movie that made her old films seem like blockbusters by comparison.

She is survived by two daughters.

· June Travis (June Dorothea Grabiner), actor, born August 7 1914; died April 14 2008

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaJ6Zobpwfo9pb2ilka58c3yOqJmirKWWv6qx0mesrJk%3D