Deanna Durbin - Cassette, Photo

Lovely photo dedicated to the famous actress and singer DIANA DURBIN and a cassette with the best of her songs. She is on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Deanna Durbin (Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, December 4, 1921 – Paris, France, April 17, 2013) was a Canadian actress and singer who gained great fame as a teenager in Hollywood musicals and comedies. She filmed between 1936 and 1948, specializing in roles of the ingénue with a lovely light soprano voice.

Biography
Edna Mae Durbin, her real name, was born December 4, 1921, at Grace Hospital in Winnipeg (Canada) to British parents, with whom she moved to California in her childhood. She was “discovered” by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer through a school singing contest in Los Angeles, where her family had moved, with the aim of making a biopic of the opera singer Ernestine Schumann-Heink, but she finally debuted in the studio’s film with a short in which another adolescent with a no less meteoric career, Judy Garland, co-starred, Every Sunday. Both were around 15 years old. With teenage roles in sugary productions, very much to the taste of the era, she achieved great popularity and helped Universal Pictures out of bankruptcy with films like Queen at Fourteen or Mad About Music (Mentirosilla).

Durbin remained with Universal throughout her professional life, which extended to more than twenty titles, also earning her fame outside the United States. Both Winston Churchill and Benito Mussolini were among her admirers, and the tragically famous Anne Frank had a photo of her hanging on the wall of the hiding place where she tried to escape the Nazis.

In 1938 she received, along with Mickey Rooney, a special Juvenile Oscar for “her significant contribution to bringing the spirit and personification of youth to the screen.” At 25, she was the second-highest-paid woman in Hollywood, behind Bette Davis, and her fan club was the largest during the 1940s. In 1945 she filmed and appeared in the cast of The Lady on the Train, directed by French filmmaker Charles David, who would become her third husband. Her last film was For the Love of Mary, by Frederick De Cordova, in 1948.

At the age of 28 she stepped away from the screens when she married French director Charles David, with whom she had her second child, and she disappeared from public life. “It couldn’t always be the little Miss Fix-It who bursts into song,” she said then. She retired with her family, children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, in the French town of Neauphle-le-Château, near Paris. For decades she declined all offers to return to cinema. Her soprano voice was often described as “beautiful and natural,” and her rendition of the aria “Un bel dì vedremo” from the opera Madama Butterfly was a best-seller. Her popularity led to dolls being made in her image, and her first on-screen kiss was a news event for newspapers of the era.