[1] Born in Los Angeles County, Dunnigan spent most of her early life in San Francisco until she left California to attend Principia College in Elsah, Illinois.
[3] In 1934 she played the role of Suzanne Barres in the premier of Hatcher Hughes' three-act comedy The Lord Blesses the Bishop.
[4][5] At the Fulton Theatre in 1938 she played Jessie Travis in Cheryl Crawford's production of All the Living, a drama that Hardie Albright adapted from Victor Small's 1935 novel, I Knew 3,000 Lunatics.
Tennessee Williams regarded her rendering of The Seagull to be the best available in English,[7] and made it the principal reference for his 1981 adaptation, The Notebook of Trigorin.
1972 saw the publication of two new editions: Tolstoy's Fables and Fairy Tales (New American Library) and Dostoyevsky's Netochka Nezvanova (Prentice Hall).