Dorothy Coburn

Dorothy Coburn (June 8, 1905 – May 15, 1978) was an American film actress who appeared in a number of early Laurel and Hardy silents. She was a niece of author Walt Coburn, and granddaughter of Robert Coburn Sr., founder of the Circle C Ranch in Montana.

Coburn was born to cowboy-poet and Western film producer Wallace Coburn and Ann Reifenrath Coburn in Great Falls, Montana but raised in Prescott, Arizona.

Her documented film repertoire consisted of sixteen silent short subjects for the Hal Roach studios, but she was also in scores of films where she acted as horseback-stuntwoman opposite such stars as Gary Cooper and Joel McCrea, and as a stand-in for Ginger Rogers in several of her dancing films with Fred Astaire. Coburn retired from the movie business in the early 1930s. An accomplished rider and a fit athlete, Coburn also occasionally worked as a stunt performer in westerns. After the advent of sound, she was sometimes engaged as a stand-in for Rogers at RKO.

After leaving the movie business in 1936, she found employment as a receptionist for an insurance company. She was married twice and died in 1978, aged 72, from emphysema.

She is interred in Grand View Memorial Park Cemetery, Glendale, California (Plot: Section B, Lot 31, Grave 7).

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