Trivia

Ironically, in one of her final performances, The Crime Doctor's Strangest Case (1943), she played the wife of a man who habitually started accidental fires with carelessly discarded smoking materials. Two such scenes were featured in the movie. Just two short years later she died in a house fire suspected to have been caused by a carelessly discarded cigarette.

Her photograph was the first natural color photograph to be transmitted by International News Pictures from Hollywood to the East Coast.

She died of asphyxiation from inhalation of fumes. She was found face down in the bathroom with first- and second-degree burns covering her body. Police thought the flames started from an unextinguished cigarette that lit a chair on fire while Dickson was sleeping and that she tried to escape through a bathroom window, where it is estimated she waited for an hour before dying.

Loved fishing, especially around Catalina Island, and even caught a 632-pound shark in August 1938.

While traveling in 1940, she stopped in Utah to see a friend, actor-singer Cliff Edwards. Her husband, Perc Westmore, reported her missing, which made national newspaper headlines for several days. When she returned from her trip, a furious Dickson insisted to the press that her husband had known where she was the whole time. It was viewed in Hollywood as a publicity stunt.

Her widower died on May 5, 1958, in the Nebraska State Penitentiary at age 47.

Her last husband was a former bodyguard to Jean Harlow. He had been a middleweight boxer.

She divorced her first husband because of his extramarital affairs, jealousy, controlling nature, and drinking. She resented his interference in her career.

She separated from Ralph Murphy in February 1943 and divorced him on grounds of mental cruelty.

She remarried her second husband, Ralph Murphy, in 1941 because her divorce from her first husband was not final when they originally wed.

Her pet boxer also died in the fire that killed her.

An audition at the Mason Opera House in Los Angeles resulted in her being cast as the lead in Seventh Heaven. She also had the leads in Smilin' Through and The Devil Passes. It was here that Warner Bros. talent scout Irving Kumin saw her perform and left her his card backstage.

Her father was seriously injured in a car accident in 1924. Having never fully recovered, he died in November 1926 at 51 years of age.

She grew up in Idaho but moved to Long Beach, California, in 1930.

Contracted to Warner Brothers during her brief Hollywood tenure.

She was a member of the Hart Players, a tent show troupe.

Stage actress.

She had an older sister, Doris.

She separated from her first husband in June, 1940.

Graduate of Long Beach Polytechnic High School.