Zelma O'Neal

Zelma O'Neal (May 29, 1903 - November 3, 1989) was an actress, singer, and dancer in the 1920s and 1930s. She appeared on Broadway and in early sound films, including the Paramount Pictures films Paramount on Parade and Follow Thru (both 1930).

She was born in Rock Falls, Illinois, on May 29, 1903, and moved to Chicago at the age of two. She attended public schools until she was fourteen, when she went to work in a factory and later took office jobs. She worked occasionally in vaudeville, at first without pay and later professionally as a vaudeville act with her sister Berenice and a piano player. Her touring brought her to the East Coast, where she was cast in Good News. Of her appearance in that musical comedy set on a college campus, Brooks Atkinson wrote in the New York Times in 1927: "one pert young freshman, Zelma O'Neal, dances herself into willing exhaustion to the snapping tune of 'The Varsity Drag'." In a profile, the paper referred to "her personality, which experts say resembles that of a caged cyclone".