Christine Cecilia McIntyre was born on April 26, 1911, in Nogales, Arizona, to John and Edna (nee Barnaby) McIntyre, one of five children. She received a Bachelor of Music degree from the Chicago Musical College in the early 1930s, where she honed her operatic soprano voice, which can be heard in a few of her movies.
Christine began her radio career in Chicago and by 1936, she was acting on the professional stage in Los Angeles, starring in plays such as "The Bird of Paradise" alongside actors like Pierce Lyden. She broke into movies with a small role in Swing Fever (1937) and signed with RKO for feature films.
This led to a series of B-westerns with stars like Buck Jones, Johnny Mack Brown, and Ray Corrigan. In 1944, with her hair newly dyed blonde, she was discovered by producer Hugh McCollum at Columbia Pictures and signed a ten-year contract to do shorts for the studio.
Over the next decade, she worked with comedians such as Andy Clyde, Hugh Herbert, and Shemp Howard, as well as Joe Besser and Joe DeRita. She will forever be remembered for her prolific work with The Three Stooges, including the 1945 short Micro-Phonies, which is considered by many fans as the trio's finest effort.
Christine developed into a first-rate comedic actress, with impeccable timing and a willingness to get "down and dirty" with slapstick experts like the Stooges. She even beat up poor Shemp Howard in the classic Brideless Groom (1947) and knocked him through a door.
Though Christine's career at Columbia consisted mostly of comedy shorts, she did appear in occasional features, often westerns. In 1953, near the end of her Columbia contract, she married radio producer/writer/actor J. Donald Wilson and soon after retired from show business.
Christine and J. Donald spent the next 30 years developing joint careers in real estate. The former actress passed away on July 8, 1984, six months after her husband, in Van Nuys, California.
