A Grapefruit Put Mae Clarke on the Map

Although she had co-starred with Boris Karloff in the original 1931 “Frankenstein,” Mae Clarke didn’t find film immortality until James Cagney smashed a grapefruit in her face.

It was one of Clarke’s smaller roles, but that scene in the 1931 gangster drama “The Public Enemy” has became a film classic.

Not originally in the script, Cagney proposed the grapefruit because he thought it would add to the scene, having known a gangster from the East Side of New York who once threw his breakfast at his girlfriend. Clarke went along with it to make the film crew laugh, later saying she might not have agreed to the scene if she knew that it would make the final cut.

About the same time Clarke got her start in film with “Big Time” and “Nix on Dames,” both in 1929, her father lost his job as an organist accompanying silent movies. She sent for her family and bought them a chicken ranch in Canoga Park.

Her many film appearances include “The Front Page,” “Singin’ in the Rain” and “Annie Get Your Gun.”

But Clarke’s favorite part, she told The Times in 1983, was playing a nice girl forced to turn to prostitution by her circumstances in the 1931 “Waterloo Bridge.”

Clarke spent the last 12 years of her life at the Motion Picture Country Home and Hospital in Woodland Hills, and died in 1992.