Biography

She was born in Chicago

Chicago

Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...

, Illinois

Illinois

Illinois is the fifth-most populous state of the United States of America, and is often noted for being a microcosm of the entire country. With Chicago in the northeast, small industrial cities and great agricultural productivity in central and northern Illinois, and natural resources like coal,...

. Her birth surname was 'Perfect', but her parents were divorced when she reached the age of five and she took the surname of her step father. Her family performed in plays and vaudeville

Vaudeville

Vaudeville was a theatrical genre of variety entertainment in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. Each performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill...

, and she had an early goal to be a Hollywood actress. At the age of twelve she was mauled by a dog which left her very self-conscious. To help overcome her shyness, she was entered into a beauty contest by her mother. Her subsequent beauty pageant victories attracted some attention and she appeared in commercials.

Her first acting role was in Beyond the Time Barrier

Beyond the Time Barrier

Beyond the Time Barrier is a 1959 Cold War era black and white time travel science fiction film filmed in ten days in Texas. It was produced by and starred Robert Clarke and was directed by Edgar G. Ulmer. Ulmer's wife Shirley acted as a script editor whilst their daughter Arianne Arden...

(1960). She then co-starred opposite Elvis Presley

Elvis Presley

Elvis Aaron Presley was one of the most popular American singers of the 20th century. A cultural icon, he is widely known by the single name Elvis. He is often referred to as the "King of Rock and Roll" or simply "the King"....

 in Blue Hawaii

Blue Hawaii

Blue Hawaii is a 1961 musical film set in the state of Hawaii and starring Elvis Presley. The screenplay by Hal Kanter was nominated by the Writers Guild of America in 1962 in the category of Best Written American Musical. The movie opened at no...

(1961). She had a role in My Six Loves

My Six Loves

My Six Loves is a 1963 comedy film starring Debbie Reynolds as a Broadway star who takes a vacation and finds herself responsible for six abandoned children, in Gower Champion's directorial debut...

(1963) and played parts in several television shows.

Her career was interrupted by a marriage and the birth of two sons. She tried to resume acting again when the marriage ended in the mid-1970s, but by then she was in her thirties and had difficulty landing roles. She has since worked as a stand-in and stuntwoman. Darlene has remarried.

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