Deanna Durbin - Cassette, Photo

Lovely photo dedicated to the famous actress and singer DIANA DURBIN and Casette 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)[1] was a Canadian actress and singer who achieved great fame as a teenager in Hollywood musicals and comedies. She filmed between 1936 and 1948, specializing in ingénue roles complemented by a beautiful light soprano voice.[2]

Biography
Edna Mae Durbin, her real name, was born on 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 opera singer Ernestine Schumann-Heink, but she finally debuted in the cinema with a studio short that co-starred another adolescent with no less brilliant career, Judy Garland, in “Every Sunday.” Both were around 15 years old.[3] With teenage roles in sugary productions, very much to the taste of the era, she achieved great popularity and even helped Universal Studios out of bankruptcy with films like Rebel at the Fourteeners or Mad About Music.

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

In 1938 she received, alongside Mickey Rooney, a special Juvenile Oscar for “her significant contribution to bringing to the screen the spirit and embodiment of youth.” At 25, she was the second-highest paid woman in Hollywood, behind Bette Davis, and her fan club was the largest during the forties. In 1945 she shot and appeared in the cast of the film La dama del tren (The Lady on the Train), directed by French filmmaker Charles David, who would become her third husband.[2] Her last film was For the Love of Mary, by Frederick DeCordova, in 1948.[3]

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