Robert Tabor retains strong memories of a stunning blond actress who, while driving to New York City, got stuck in a snowstorm, sought shelter in Stonington and was taken in by Tabor’s uncle, a shy and quiet mailman known for nursing stray animals back to health.

The actress was Dorothy Comingore, who had had a prominent role as Susan Alexander Kane, the mistress and then wife of Charles Foster Kane in one of the most acclaimed movies of all time, Citizen Kane. Critics raved about her performance. The mailman was John Crowe, who ran a small variety store called The Crowe’s Nest in Lords Point, a summer colony in Stonington.

According to Tabor and others who knew this most unlikely couple, they got married and lived happily ever after, enjoying their dogs and cats together. She had landed far away from Los Angeles but she lived out a kind of a Hollywood ending. Tabor says, “She told me she relished her life here. I think she considered it a blessing she found my uncle and Lords Point.”

She needed more than shelter from the storm. In 1957, when she arrived in Stonington, Comingore’s career was in ruins. Five years earlier she had faced off against the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was investigating “Communist infiltration” of the film business.

Douglas Bjorn, who also got to know Comingore at Lords Point, recalls her proudly telling him about that encounter with HUAC members, even though it led to the end of her film career, losing custody of her two children, getting charged with prostitution and being committed to an institution for the mentally ill. “She had very distinct feelings about what was right and what was wrong,” Bjorn says. “And ‘ratting’ on people was something she would never do.”

Tabor is still so impressed by how Comingore stood up against the HUAC that he read back to me a transcript he has retained. When asked if she were a member of the Communist Party, she answered: “I refuse to answer because you cannot inquire into my opinions or associates under the First Amendment, and in the second place you cannot compel me to testify against myself under the Fifth Amendment, and my third reason is going to be very short too. I am a simple person and my attitude toward my country, its institutions and its people is a simple but passionate one, and that attitude can be summed up in one word, and the word is loyalty. Beyond that, my philosophy taught me by my mother is based on compassion for all of the people struggling to live in dignity.”

Comingore then accused the committee members of “conspiring to destroy my country.”

Tabor notes, “Given all that transpired and what happened to her career, this shows her integrity and strength of character. She knew it would not be received well. It shows the courage of the woman.”

Tabor learned that Comingore spent most of her life supporting labor unions, African Americans and the downtrodden. “I guess I’d call her a progressive. But she was also a patriot.”

Although Tabor says many people now living at Lords Point know the name Dorothy Comingore and have some idea of her life, documentary filmmaker Frank Durant and Comingore’s son, California film director and writer Michael Collins, are determined to bring her out of the shadows. They believe that her complex, compelling story needs to be told.

Durant, who lives outside Attleboro, Mass., met people who knew Comingore when he was filming his murder-mystery pilot Mystic in 2016. The more he heard about her, the more he wanted to make a documentary about her life. He also began raising funds to erect a memorial marker for her in Stonington Cemetery. (Crowe scattered her ashes in her favorite places in California and near Lords Point after she died in 1971 at age 58.)

FROM THE ARCHIVES: More about Dorothy Comingore’s life in “Falling Star” (June 1980)

Durant interviewed five of those people who still remember Comingore. But then he learned Collins has spent decades working on a documentary of his own about her. And so Durant turned over his interview material to Collins. “If someone’s going to do this story,” Durant tells me, “it should be Michael.”

“Everybody has a different theory about who my mother was,” Collins says from his home in Ojai, Calif. “Instead of a reporter looking for Charles Foster Kane, it’s her son looking for his mother’s ‘Rosebud.’ I see her story as a modern-day Citizen Kane.”

Collins notes the meaning of “Rosebud” remains a mystery to the reporter and everybody else in that 1941 Orson Welles movie — although the viewers know “Rosebud” is the name of the sled Kane loved as a child.

When I ask Collins if he has found his mother’s “Rosebud,” he says: “Yes and no. There are still a lot of mysteries about her life. There are a lot of rumors about her. One of the mysteries is whether she was a member of the Communist Party. The FBI said she was. But she told me she was never a member because she wasn’t a joiner. It is clear she never stopped believing in what the party’s members said they believed in. She was definitely left wing. She took clothing to the ‘Arkies’ and ‘Okies’ escaping from the Dust Bowl when she was a teenager.”

Collins says he has heard contradictory stories from people as to whether his mother, plagued by career setbacks and losing custody of Michael and his sister Judith, was an alcoholic. “The truth is, she became an alcoholic. She had her demons.”

Even before her HUAC appearance, Comingore faced the consequences of her firm beliefs. “Hollywood then was a man’s world,” says Collins, who is also working on a book about his mother. “Women weren’t supposed to be outspoken.” Collins has a note from an RKO Studios executive saying: “Dorothy, you’ve been a naughty girl” because she refused to continue doing movies with the Three Stooges.

After she was blacklisted, the heat intensified. In 1953 she was arrested on a prostitution charge, an incident widely regarded as trumped up. (Meanwhile, her husband, screenwriter Richard Collins, “named names” for the HUAC and revived his film career.)

During Comingore’s court battle over the prostitution charge, a judge prohibited her from seeing her kids. In order to have the charge dropped, she agreed to go to an asylum for people with mental illness. She remained there for two years.

Collins didn’t see his mother again until he was an adult. “She called me on my 21st birthday. I visited her in Stonington in 1966. I regret I didn’t see her much more after that.”

At the end of our long interview I again ask Collins if he has ever found his mother’s “Rosebud.” He responds: “I think her ‘Rosebud’ was that she really cared for other human beings and dedicated her life not to herself, her career or even her children — but to her belief that we need to take care of other humans.”