Oscar Profile #566: Deanna Durbin

Born December 4, 1921 in Winnipeg, Canada, Edna Mae Durbin moved to California with her British born parents as an infant. Singing from the age of one and professionally from the age of ten, she made her film debut as Deanna Durbin at 14 in the 1936 MGM short film, Every Sunday co-starring Judy Garland. Garland was immediately signed to a long-term contract by MGM while Durbin’s short-term contract was allowed to lapse, and she was signed by Universal later that year.

Durbin’s first Universal film was 1936’s Three Smart Girls which along with her 1937 film, 100 Men and a Girl, received multiple Oscar nominations including one for Best Picture. 100 Men and a Girl won for Best Score. These two films were also credited with saving Universal from bankruptcy along with her two 1938 hits, Mad About Music and That Certain Age. Durbin herself won an honorary Oscar for her 1938 work along as did Mickey Rooney, largely for his work in Boys Town and the Andy Hardy films.

Smash hits continued for Durbin with 1939’s Three Smart Girls Grow Up and First Love in which she had first on-screen kiss from Robert Stack. Equally successful were her 1940 and 1941 films, It’s a Date, Spring Parade, Nice Girl? , and It Started with Eve. Now the highest paid star in Hollywood, Durbin was suspended for refusing to film They Lived Alone with the comment “I can’t run around being a Little Miss Fix-It who bursts into song—the highest-paid star with the poorest material.”

Married to assistant director Vaughan Paul in 1941, they divorced in 1943 when she returned to Universal in the more sophisticated The Amazing Mrs. Halliday, followed by Hers to Hold and His Butler’s Sister. Her 1944 film noir, Christmas Holiday opposite Gene Kelly was a flop, but her first and only color film, the same year’s Can’t Help Singing was a hit. She married second husband, writer-producer-actor Felix Jackson who produced her 1945 film, Lady on a Train, later that same year.

Pregnant during the filming of 1946’s Because of Him, she would make just four more films, 1947’s I’ll Be Yours and Something in the Wind, and 1948’s Up in Central Park and For the Love of Mary.

After the completion of For the Love of Mary, Durbin walked away from Hollywood while still at the top. Divorced from Jackson in 1949, she married third husband, French director Charles David in 1950 with the promise that he would allow her to live an anonymous life. They moved to France where Durbin gave birth to a son in 1951.

Durbin subsequently refused all offers to return to film as well as the lead in the original 1956 Broadway production of My Fair Lady.

She granted a rare interview to film historian David Shipman in 1983, in which she steadfastly asserted her right to privacy and maintained it to the end of her life.

Deanna Durbin died in France on April 17, 2013 at the age of 91.

ESSENTIAL FILMS

MAD ABOUT MUSIC (1938) , directed by Norman Taurog

Nominated for four Oscars, this screwball teenage comedy was only Durbin’s third film, yet her mastery of the medium is evident throughout. She plays the daughter of a movie star (Gail Patrick) who invents an explorer father and then has to produce him to convince her fellow students that she didn’t make him up. Herbert Marshall is the distinguished gentleman she gets to help her in her deception. Arthur Treacher, William Frawley, Marica Mae Jones, and Jackie Moran co-star. Durbin’s songs include her signature version of “Ave Maria”. This and her follow-up hit, That Certain Age earned her an honorary Oscar.

NICE GIRL? (1941) , directed by William A. Seiter

Durbin excels as usual in this tribute to small town Americana in which she plays one of three daughters of professor Robert Benchley, all of whom fall in love with her father’s business partner (Franchot Tone). Anne Gwynne is her older sister and Ann Gillis her younger one. Robert Stack, who gave Durbin her first on-screen kiss two years earlier in First Love is her taken for granted boyfriend. Durbin’s songs range from the homespun “Old Folks at Home” and “Beneath the Lights of Home” to the patriotic “Thank You America”. The latter was replaced in the U.K. with “There’ll Always Be an England”.

IT STARTED WITH EVE (1941) , directed by Henry Koster

Production was delayed for two months on this one while Durbin went on an extended honeymoon with her first husband. She has her first grown-up role here as a hatcheck girl who is hired by heir-to-be Robert Cummings to pretend to be his fiancé in order to impress his dying father played by the inestimable Charles Laughton. This being a screwball comedy, Laughton recovers, and complications ensue when Cummings’ real fiancé and her mother show up at the old mansion. The only Durbin film to premiere at Radio City Music Hall, its only Oscar nomination was for Best Score. Remade in 1964 as I’d Rather Be Rich.

SOMETHING IN THE WIND (1947) , directed by Irving Pichel

Wearing shorter hair than usual and singing in a non-operatic style more befitting of the Andrews Sisters and the emerging Doris Day than Durbin’s usuals thrilling soprano, her character is saucier than usual as well, evoking the style of an Ann Sothern, Glenda Farrell or Joan Blondell from a decade earlier. Donald O’Connor and John Dall are her co-stars in another stylish screwball comedy in which Durbin plays a disc jockey wrongly accused of being Dall’s late grandfather’s mistress. Opera singer Jan Peerce and character actresses Margaret Wycherly as Dall’s grandmother and Jean Adair as Durbin’s aunt co-star.

FOR THE LOVE OF MARY (1948) , directed by Frederick De Cordova

Durbin’s last film was another screwball comedy in which she plays a White House telephone operator whose would-be romance with lobbyist Don Taylor is broken up by the unseen U.S. President (Harry Truman) in favor a young sailor (Edmond O’Brien) after she breaks her engagement to an aide to the Supreme Court (Jeffrey Lynn). The President’s Chief of Staff (Ray Collins), a restauranteur (Hugo Haas), and three Supreme Court Justices (led by Harry Davenport) come to her aid. Durbin and the Justices sing “On Moonlight Bay”, “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” and “Let Me Call You Sweetheart”.