West, Mae

West, Mae (1892-1980), American actress, a master of the double entendre, known for her portrayals of flamboyantly sexy women of lost virtue and irreverent wit. Born in Brooklyn, New York, she worked as a child actress before moving to vaudeville and musical comedy. Her appearance on Broadway in her plays Sex (1926), for which she ended up with a jail sentence on obscenity charges, and Diamond Lil (1928; film version, She Done Him Wrong, 1933) made her a public figure. By 1940, when along with the comedian W. C. Fields, she wrote and starred in My Little Chickadee,censorship had toned down her film characters, such as those in Night After Night (1932) and I'm No Angel (1933), although she remained a national and international sex icon for decades.

She later worked mainly onstage, notably in her Broadway play Catherine Was Great (1944). She reappeared on film in 1970 in Myra Breckinridge and in 1978 in Sextette. Besides her scripts, West wrote several novels and an autobiography, Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It (1959).