Deanna Durbin

Deanna Durbin entered the world as the second child of British immigrant parents who relocated the household to Southern California during her infancy. Early signs of vocal ability prompted her to enroll at Ralph Thomas' Academy in Los Angeles for formal voice instruction. In 1935, still in her early teens, she earned a role through audition in an MGM project then planned as a biography of opera singer Ernestine Schumann-Heink. The studio cast her first in the short Every Sunday, where she shared the screen with Judy Garland, another aspiring young singer and actress six months her junior. An often-repeated though probably unfounded account claims MGM chose to retain only one of the pair and dismissed Durbin in error. In reality the studio allowed her contract to lapse once the Schumann-Heink film was abandoned. Rufus LeMaire, the casting director who had originally brought her to MGM and had since moved to Universal, then signed her and persuaded his new studio to place her in Three Smart Girls. During production she joined Eddie Cantor's radio program as a regular performer, and shortly before the film's release she began cutting sides for Decca Records, just as she turned fifteen.

Three Smart Girls proved a major success and established Durbin as a star. She completed twenty further pictures for Universal by 1948. In each she typically performed several numbers that mixed newly composed material with operatic arias, and she frequently recorded the same selections again in Decca studios; original soundtrack albums did not appear until late in her career. Her films far eclipsed the recordings in visibility, and only one of those discs, "My Own"—also featured in the 1938 release That Certain Age—reached the charts. By the mid-1940s Durbin had grown disenchanted with Hollywood, a feeling sharpened by the weak commercial performance of Christmas Holiday (1944), a Somerset Maugham adaptation that represented her bid to be taken seriously as an actress. Though she ranked as the industry's highest-paid female star in 1947, she retired from the screen in 1948 at age twenty-six. In 1950 she married her third husband, Charles David of Pathé Films, and settled in Normandy, France, where she stayed out of public view. Her films nevertheless continued to air on television and later appeared on video, while many of her recordings—drawn from motion pictures, radio broadcasts, and the Decca catalog—remained in circulation.