"My father was astounded, but she told him that I had the theater in me. It put a bee in my bonnet, I guess," she told The Sun during a 1972 visit to Baltimore.
"These were the days before psychoanalysis, so I found therapy in the theater. I was timid and shy, but I found in the theater an outlet. It freed me. Goucher opened that door," she said.
After graduating from Goucher, she taught at Friends School while performing in shows at the Johns Hopkins University and the Vagabond Players, where she made her debut in a 1924 production of W. Somerset Maugham's Penelope.
Dunnock left Baltimore and earned a master's degree in theater at Columbia, and made her Broadway debut in 1932 playing Miss Pinty in Life Begins while teaching at Brearley, a private girls' school in New York City.
Turning to Broadway full time during the 1940s, Dunnock played roles in Foolish Notion with Tallulah Bankhead, Lute Song with Mary Martin and The Corn Is Green with Ethel Barrymore.
"She was small and slight with a thin, mobile mouth, and she excelled at playing the parts of mothers and eccentric ladies of various kinds," The New York Times wrote at her death in 1991. "Her admirers praised her power to move audiences by making them care for the characters she portrayed."
In an earlier interview with The New York Times, Dunnock explained the type of roles she sought.
"I like to play parts that are not like myself," she said. "I'm not the least bit exciting. I'm an ordinary person in an ordinary life, but in my imagination there's no stopping me."
Dunnock originated the Linda Loman role in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, which opened on Broadway in 1949.
In a stunning performance that earned her rave notices from the New York critics, Dunnock is remembered for uttering the memorable line that "attention must be paid" to Willy Loman, her broken-down salesman husband, played by Lee J. Cobb. She re-created the role for the 1951 film, which earned her an Academy Award nomination, and reprised the role again in a 1966 CBS TV production.
Dunnock was not Miller's or director Elia Kazan's choice for Linda, but she persisted in coming to readings, one time dressed in a disguise that was quickly unmasked.
"Of course as soon as she began to read we recognized Millie's unique voice and everybody collapsed in laughter," Miller wrote in Theater Week in 1991.
