Jean Muir papers

Jean Muir was an American stage and film actress and educator who was one of the first performers to be blacklisted after her name appeared in the anti-Communist 1950 pamphlet Red Channels.

Jean Muir Fullarton was born in Suffern, New York, on February 13, 1911. Muir attended schools in New Jersey and studied French history and literature at the Sorbonne in Paris. Upon returning to the United States from France, Muir joined a company of Bird in Hand. After acting in several stock productions, she appeared on Broadway in shows including The Truth Game, Peter Ibbetson, Dinner at Eight, and Life Begins. In 1933, as one of the stars of Saint Wench, she was spotted by a talent scout and signed to a contract with Warner Bros. Muir appeared in forty films with the studio, starring in thirty of them, including As the Earth Turns (1934), Desirable (1934), The White Cockatoo (1935), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), Stars Over Broadway (1935), and White Bondage (1937). By the late 1930s, Muir began devoting more of her professional time to theatre, including an appearance in London in J. B. Priestley’s People at Sea, and eventually radio and television work.

In 1939 Muir helped organize the American Guild of Variety Artists. She was also involved in the formation of the Screen Actors Guild. Muir was a vocal critic of racism in Hollywood. She was a member of several activist organizations and participated in public events and campaigns around the country with politicians and activists such as Fiorello La Guardia, Fredi Washington, and Eleanor Roosevelt.

In 1950, Muir was named as a suspected Communist sympathizer in the anti-Communist pamphlet Red Channels. Muir was immediately removed from the cast of the television sitcom The Aldrich Family, in which she had been cast as Mrs. Aldrich, making Muir the first performer to lose employment because of a listing in Red Channels. Muir denied the charges and defended herself before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, but her acting career was irreparably damaged by the blacklisting. Muir did not work in television again until 1958. She returned to Broadway in 1960.

Muir taught drama and directed plays at community centers in New York, and in 1968, she became the Master Acting Teacher at Stephens College in Missouri. She also directed and acted in several productions at the college. In 1976, a mandatory retirement policy forced Muir to leave Stephens College at the age of 65. She went on to teach in several theatre programs at universities across the United States and continued to direct and act in productions at the schools.

From 1940-1960, Muir was married to entertainment attorney, and later television producer, Henry Jaffe. The couple had three children: David Jaffe, Michael Jaffe, and Margaret Bauer. Muir died in Mesa, Arizona, on July 23, 1996.