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Deanna Durbin
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Deanna Durbin (born December 4, 1921) is a Canadian singer and actress.
Edna Mae Durbin at Grace Hospital in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, she adopted the professional name Deanna at the commencement of her career. Her parents, James and Ada Durbin, were immigrants from Lancashire, England, and she had an older sister named Edith. Beginning her career as a teenager in Hollywood films, Durbin achieved her greatest popularity during the 1930s and 1940s.
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Encyclopedia
Deanna Durbin (born December 4, 1921) is a Canadian singer and actress.
Early life
Born Edna Mae Durbin at Grace Hospital in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, she adopted the professional name Deanna at the commencement of her career. Her parents, James and Ada Durbin, were immigrants from Lancashire, England, and she had an older sister named Edith. Beginning her career as a teenager in Hollywood films, Durbin achieved her greatest popularity during the 1930s and 1940s. She won an Academy Juvenile Award in 1938, and appeared in several musical films, however her efforts to progress into more mature, dramatic roles was not well received by audiences, and she retired in the late 1940s.
Career
Durbin signed a contract with MGM in 1935 and made her first film appearance in a short subject Every Sunday with another contractee, Judy Garland. Studio executives were questioning the wisdom of having two girl singers on the roster and the film was to serve as an extended screen test for the pair. Ultimately Louis B. Mayer decreed that both girls would be kept, but by the time that decision was made Durbin's contract option had elapsed.
In Life magazine's December 21, 1936 issue, before the release of her first feature length film, a young Deanna was featured in the article "Their Music Makes News", which was about new and exceptional young musical talents, and is pictured cutting her 15th birthday cake.
Durbin was quickly signed to a contract with Universal Studios and made her first feature-length film Three Smart Girls in 1936. The huge success of her films was reported to have saved the studio from bankruptcy. In 1938 she received a special Academy Juvenile Award, along with Mickey Rooney. Such was Durbin's international fame and popularity that diarist Anne Frank pasted her picture to her bedroom wall in the Achterhuis where the Frank family hid during World War II. The picture can still be seen there today, and was pointed out by Frank's friend Hannah Pick-Goslar in the documentary film Anne Frank Remembered.
In 1936, Durbin auditioned to provide the vocals for Snow White in Disney's animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs but was ultimately rejected by Walt Disney, who declared the 15 year old Durbin's voice "too old" for the part.
Durbin is perhaps best known for her singing voice—a voice described variously as light but full, sweet, unaffected and artless. With the technical skill and vocal range of a legitimate lyric soprano, she performed everything from popular standards to operatic arias. Dame Sister Mary Leo in New Zealand was so taken with Durbin's technique that she trained all her students to sing in this way. Sister Mary Leo produced a large number of famous sopranos including Dames Malvina Major and Kiri Te Kanawa, all of whom were said to sound like her.
The Russian cellist/conductor Mstislav Rostropovich in a late 1980s interview cited Deanna as one of his most important musical influences, stating: "She helped me in my discovery of myself. You have no idea of the smelly old movie houses I patronized to see Deanna Durbin. I tried to create the very best in my music, to try and recreate, to approach her purity."
Durbin married an assistant director, Vaughn Paul, in 1941 and they were divorced in 1943. Her second marriage, to film writer-producer-actor Felix Jackson in 1945, produced a daughter, Jessica Louise Jackson, and ended in divorce in 1949.
In private life, the actress continued to use her given name; salary figures printed annually by the Hollywood trade publications listed the actress as "Edna Mae Durbin, player." Her studio continued to cast her in musicals, and filmed two sequels to her original success, Three Smart Girls. The second sequel was a wartime story called Three Smart Girls Join Up, but Durbin issued a press release announcing that she was no longer inclined to participate in these team efforts and was now performing as a solo artist. The Three Smart Girls Join Up title was changed to Hers to Hold.
She made her only film in Technicolor in 1944, Can't Help Singing featuring some of the last songs written by Jerome Kern. It has a distinction of being one of the few musical comedies with a Western setting, filmed mostly on location in southern Utah. Her co-star was Robert Paige, who is better known for his work in television dramas in the 1950s.
Durbin then tried to assume a more sophisticated film persona in such films as the film noir Christmas Holiday (1944) and the whodunit Lady on a Train (1945), but the public preferred her in light musicals. In 1947, her employers merged with two other companies to create Universal-International, and the new regime discontinued most of Universal's familiar product, including musicals, westerns, and comedies. Durbin stayed on for three more pictures before quitting the studio in 1948. Durbin's new bosses sued her for wages they had paid in advance, but Durbin settled the suit amicably by agreeing to make three more pictures, including one to be filmed on location in Paris.
Durbin did go to Paris, but not for professional reasons. She married Charles David, who had directed her in Lady on a Train. Durbin vowed that she would never return to show business, so the three films were never made.
She and her husband raised Durbin's second child, Peter David. Since then she has resisted numerous offers to perform, including several by Mario Lanza, and has granted only one brief interview in 1983, to film historian David Shipman, steadfastly asserting her right to privacy. She maintains that privacy today, declining to be profiled on Internet websites. However, she made it known that she did not like the Hollywood studio system and decided to retire.
Her husband, director Charles David, died in Paris on March 1, 1999.
Deanna Durbin has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1722 Vine Street.
Frank Tashlin's 1937 Warner Bros. cartoon The Woods are Full of Cuckoos contains an avian caricature of Deanna Durbin called "Deanna Terrapin".
Durbin's name found its way into the introduction to a song written by satirical writer Tom Lehrer in 1965. Prior to singing "Whatever Became of Hubert?", Lehrer said that Vice President Hubert Humphrey had been relegated to "those where-are-they-now columns: Whatever became of Deanna Durbin, and Hubert Humphrey, and so on."
Filmography
External links
- - The opening scene of Something in the Wind - "The Turntable Song"
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