Deanna Durbin

One of America’s all-time favorite, highest-paid actresses. She’s certainly one of my favorites: she is benevolence personified and has a beautiful, operatic voice. There are a good number of video clips from her movies on the Internet that are absolutely worth watching, like the song “Perhaps” (1 min 51 sec), “The Turntable Song” (1 min 47 sec) and, in her introduction to the world — thank goodness!! — “My Heart is Singing” (3 min 39 sec). More good stuff…another day…

Image from Dr. Macro’s High Quality Movie Scans.

An Internet Movie Database short bio of Ms. Durbin says:

The girl who one day would be known as “Winnipeg’s Sweetheart” was born at Grace Hospital on December 4, 1921, as Edna Mae Durbin. In her early childhood there were no obvious signs that one day she would be a bigger box office attraction than Shirley Temple. Renamed Deanna Durbin for show business purposes, by age 14 she was the most highly paid female star in the world. Her major motion pictures were Three Smart Girls (1936), Mad About Music (1938) and That Certain Age (1938). By the time she was 18 her income was $250,000 a year. Her voice

was often described as “natural and beautiful” and her version of “One Fine Day” from Madame Butterfly, with Leopold Stokowski conducting the orchestra, became a classic. Deanna was a Hollywood star in every way. There were Deanna Durbin dolls and dresses. An engineering firm named its so-called dream home in her honor. Her first screen kiss was described in a headline story across the continent. What makes Deanna Durbin’s story different is that she was never comfortable with adulation. When she was at the top of her career as Hollywood’s leading actress and singer, she turned her back on that world for a life of seclusion. Her first two marriages had failed, and before she married her third husband, director Charles David, she set one condition: he had to promise that she could have what she yearned for – “the life of nobody”. Her seclusion is incomplete. She lives in the French village of Neauphlé-le-Château, and for over 35 years has resisted every approach from film companies. Her husband has told journalists that “Mario Lanza pleaded with her for years to make a film with him. But she will never go back to that life.” She has not been interviewed since 1949. IMDb Mini Biography By: Simona*Sara < simel@escape.ca> Copyright © 1990-2009 IMDb.com, Inc.

And a bio on Answers.com says:

Canadian actress/singer Deanna Durbin learned at a very early age that she was blessed with a strong and surprisingly mature set of vocal chords. After studying with coach Andres de Segurola, Durbin set her sights on an operatic career, but was sidetracked into films with a 1936 MGM short subject, Every Sunday. This one-reeler was designed as an audition for both Durbin and her equally youthful co-star Judy Garland; MGM decided to go with Durbin and drop Garland, but by a front-office fluke the opposite happened and it was Durbin who found herself on the outside looking in. But MGM’s loss was Universal’s gain. That studio, threatened with receivership due to severe losses, decided to gamble on her potential. Under the guiding influence of Universal executive Joseph Pasternak, Durbin was cast in a series of expensive, carefully crafted musicals, beginning in 1936 with Three Smart Girls. This and subsequent films–notably One Hundred Men and a Girl (1937) — craftily exploited Durbin’s remarkable operatic voice, but at the same time cast her as a “regular kid” who was refreshingly free of diva-like behavior. The strategy worked, and Durbin almost single-handedly saved Universal from oblivion; she was awarded a 1938 special Oscar “for bringing to the screen the spirit and personification of youth,” and when she received her first screen kiss (from Robert Stack) in First Love (1939), the event knocked the European crisis off the front pages. Actor. Copyright © 2009 All Media Guide, LLC. All rights reserved.

Image from Dr. Macro’s High Quality Movie Scans.