Actress. The youngest of five children, the daughter of a Texas auto mechanic and a housewife, Ann Sheridan came to Hollywood as the 18-year-old winner of Paramount's 1933 "Search for Beauty" contest, and made her film debut in a 1934 film of the same name. She was a college student at North Texas State Teacher's College, when her sister thought she was beautiful enough to send in a picture of Ann in a bathing suit to Paramount Pictures. Billed under her real name, she played small parts in Come on, Marines, The Lemon Drop Kid, Ladies Should Listen, Murder at the Vanities, Bolero, Kiss and Make Up, College Rhythm (all in 1934), before landing her first leading role, billed as Ann Sheridan, in Rocky Mountain Mystery (1935), a Western whodunit. Paramount kept her busy throughout 1935 with mostly small, supporting roles, even using her as a body double and she left the studio, winding up at Warner Bros., who billed her as the "Oomph Girl". In 1936 she had supporting roles in Black Legion and Sing Me a Love Song before finally landing a leading role in The Great O'Malley (1937), starring Pat O'Brien and Humphrey Bogart. A succession of B pictures followed until director Michael Curtiz gave her the role of a strong-minded slum girl in his gangster drama Angels With Dirty Faces in 1938. The success of that film earned Sheridan better roles in bigger pictures through the end of the 1930s and into the 1940s, including Torrid Zone and They Drive by Night (both 1940), Honeymoon for Three and The Man Who Came to Dinner (both 1941). She delivered what may have been the finest performance of her career as 'Randy Monoghan', the loyal small-town girl in Kings Row (1942, co-starring Ronald Reagan). She won excellent reviews in the role and Warners responded by putting her in other big-budget films throughout the 1940s, including George Washington Slept Here, Thank Your Lucky Stars, Edge of Darkness, Shine On, Harvest Moon, Nora Prentiss, The Unfaithful, and Silver River. She left the studio after making an unbilled guest appearance in The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1948). As a freelance actor, she starred or co-starred in Good Sam (1948), I Was a Male War Bride (1949, co-starring Cary Grant and directed by Howard Hawks), Stella and Woman on the Run (both 1950), Steel Town, Just Across the Street (both 1952), Take Me to Town, Appointment in Honduras, (both 1953), Come Next Spring, The Opposite Sex (both 1956) and The Woman and The Hunter (1957). She worked several years in the theatre before turning to TV, where she starred in the daytime soap opera "Another World" (1965 to 1966) and the sitcom "Pistols and Petticoats" (1966 to 1967). A chain smoker, Ann Sheridan died of throat cancer at age 51 in 1967. Her first two husbands were actors Edward Norris (1936 to 1939) and George Brent (1942 to 1943).