babysitter lunged at him. He was unhurt. Dunn grew up in New Rochelle, New York, and attended school there. He often skipped high school classes to hang around film studios in the upper Bronx. Early film and stage career After graduation, Dunn tried his hand at sales, selling lunch wagons and also becoming an automobile demonstrator. He worked for three years in his father's brokerage firm. But his real love was the theater. In 1927 he left his father's employ to join a small theatrical troupe. He later said in a 1934 interview: "I wasn't at all sure I'd be a hit, or even an actor good enough to obtain reasonably steady work. But that didn't make a lot of difference. I could not see any other career and I knew I wouldn't be happy unless I tried it". He also sought out jobs as an extra in short films at Paramount Pictures' Long Island studios. He joined a stock theater company out of Englewood, New Jersey, for a 37-week engagement, and performed with another company, the Permanent Players, at the Playhouse Theatre in Winnipeg, Canada, for a 22-week run. With the latter troupe, he was said to be "highly popular" among theatre-goers for his "pleasing, breezy personality". Upon his return to New York, he landed the male lead in the 1929 Broadway musical Sweet Adeline, opposite Helen Morgan. Success in Hollywood Dunn's Broadway performance attracted the attention of film studio executives. In 1931, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), which conducted its screen tests at Fox Film's Astoria Studios in Queens, New York, called Dunn in for a screen test. A Fox Film employee asked if they could also test Dunn, and had him read a scene from the stage production of Bad Girl. While MGM was not impressed with their result, Fox director Frank Borzage liked Dunn's screen test and wanted to cast him in his upcoming film version of Bad Girl. Dunn signed a film contract with Fox a few days later and relocated to Hollywood; his mother came to live with him the following year. Dunn made his screen debut in Bad Girl (1931), which catapulted him and co-star Sally Eilers to "overnight fame". A Baltimore Evening Sun review wrote: "Without Dunn, Bad Girl would be just another movie. With him, it's something that provokes chuckles, tears, laughs, sighs and everything else that a nice little movie hopes to provoke".