Actress Frances Dee dies at 94

Dee was compared to the great film beauty Great Garbo

Actress Frances Dee, widow of western hero Joel McCrea and one of the last stars of Hollywood's "Golden Age", has died in Los Angeles at the age of 94.

Dee began her career in 1929, starring opposite Maurice Chevalier in Playboy of Paris. She retired in 1954 to devote herself to her husband and three sons.

Dee acted alongside the likes of Gary Cooper, Bette Davis and John Wayne.

But her beauty lost her a role in Gone with the Wind. Producer David Selznick felt she would overshadow Vivien Leigh.

The role of Melanie Wilkes went instead to Olivia de Havilland.

'I played a masochistic nymphomaniacal kleptomaniac, not a prostitute,'" Frances Dee one her role in Blood Money

She met her husband, the actor Joel McCrea, when the pair starred together in the film The Silver Cord in 1933. They married later that year, and also appeared together in Wells Fargo in 1937 and 1948's Four Faces West.

The pair's marriage lasted for 57 years, one of the longest in Hollywood.

James Agee, a major film critic of the 1930s and 40s said the actress was "one of the very few women in movies who really had a face...and always used this translucent face with delicate and exciting talent."

New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, compared a close-up of Dee in the 1941 film So Ends Our Night to Greta Garbo's famous close-up in the celebrated film Queen Christina.

Dee and husband John McCrea's marriage lasted 57 years

Dee's biographer Andrew Wentink said she had recently gained new fame for her role in films that forced the adoption of a Hollywood code on morality in the 1930s.

These included the thriller I Walked with a Zombie and Blood Money, a drama about immoral women.

"When a friend recently admonished her for playing a prostitute in Blood Money, she denied it saying, 'I played a masochistic nymphomaniacal kleptomaniac, not a prostitute,'" Mr Wentink said.