Dorothy Coburn

Coburn was born to cowboy-poet and Western film producer Wallace Coburn and Ann Reifenrath Coburn in Great Falls, Montana but raised in Prescott, Arizona.^[1]

Coburn played ingenue leads and comedic roles.^[2] Her documented film repertoire consisted of 16 silent short subjects for the Hal Roach studios, and she appeared in scores of films as horseback-stuntwoman opposite such stars as Gary Cooper and Joel McCrea,^{[citation needed]} and as a stand-in for Ginger Rogers in several of her dancing films with Fred Astaire.^[1] Coburn retired from the movie business in the early 1930s. Coburn occasionally worked as a stunt performer in westerns.^{[citation needed]}

After leaving the movie business in 1936, she found employment as a receptionist for an insurance company. She was married twice. Coburn died in 1978, aged 72, from emphysema.^[1] She is interred in Grand View Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.^[3]

Her first husband, Joseph Maier, died in Santa Barbara on March 4, 1959.^[4] In 1973 she married Harry W. Heap in Santa Barbara, California. Before Coburn's death in 1978, the couple lived in Rancho Palos Verdes.^{[citation needed]}