Yahoo Finance Jane Powell obituary
Jane Powell, who has died aged 92, was a singing star at MGM during the heyday of the studio’s musicals, from the mid-1940s to the mid-50s. She had a creamy coloratura soprano voice and appeared in several glossy, gossamer entertainments, playing a love-sick teenager before graduating to adulthood at the age of 25 with her best role as Milly in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954).
In Stanley Donen’s exuberant film, the diminutive Powell is wooed by the baritone Howard Keel (singing Bless Your Beautiful Hide), and despite the disparity in their heights they made a good match. Powell attempts to civilise her six unruly brothers-in-law, teaching them to dance politely in the number Goin’ Courtin’. She was never again to play such a mature and well-rounded character. It was the peak of her career.
Powell had made her screen debut at 15 in Song of the Open Road (1944), which was virtually a showcase for her vocal talent. She then enlivened Delightfully Dangerous (1945), as a music student who believes her sister is a Broadway star rather than the stripper she is in reality. Both were modest black-and-white affairs for United Artists.
Happily, Powell was spotted by the Hungarian-born producer Joe Pasternak, who had steered the juvenile soprano Deanna Durbin through 10 musicals at Universal. Now at MGM, Pasternak, who seemed to have a penchant for the popular classics, found Powell perfect material through which he could relive his days at Universal with Durbin.
Powell was made into a blond and cast as a teenage Miss Fixit in bright Technicolored family fare. The title of one of her most characteristic films, Small Town Girl (1953), summed up her appeal. She was the eternal “girl next door”, whose every on-screen romance was her first.
Pasternak’s favourite emblems of “long-haired” music were the great Danish heldentenor Lauritz Melchior and the Spanish virtuoso pianist José Iturbi, who always appeared as himself. In Holiday in Mexico (1946), Powell’s debut MGM movie, she has a crush on Iturbi, and in Luxury Liner (1948), she gets to sing a duet from Verdi’s Aida with Melchior.
Powell was delightful in A Date With Judy (1948), mistakenly thinking her father (Wallace Beery) is having an affair with Carmen Miranda. In Nancy Goes to Rio (1950), an agreeable remake of Durbin’s 1940 film It’s a Date, she played a daughter who vies with her mother (Ann Sothern) for the same part in a play and for the same man.
Her biggest break came accidentally, when she replaced June Allyson (who had become pregnant) and Judy Garland (who was ill) in Royal Wedding (1951), Donen’s first solo effort. The puerile plot was forgotten among the lively numbers performed by Fred Astaire and Powell as a brother-sister act in London for Princess Elizabeth’s marriage. In particular, Powell got a chance to show her dancing skills (with Astaire) as a gum-chewing dame in an intentionally corny vaudeville number with the longest of titles, How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Love You When You Know I’ve Been a Liar All My Life?
After she made Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, her final film for MGM was the less than inspiring sailors-on-leave musical Hit the Deck, though she was spirited as the daughter of an admiral, played by Walter Pidgeon. The Girl Most Likely (1957), one of the very last films made by RKO, was an enjoyable enough musical remake of the Ginger Rogers 1941 movie Tom, Dick and Harry, in which Powell is engaged to three men at the same time.
However, the modest small-town musicals in which she thrived were dying, and she had outgrown her innocent, girl-next-door image. Powell only featured in two more films (both 1958), the melodrama The Female Animal, as Hedy Lamarr’s adopted daughter, and miscast as a South-Sea island native girl (in dusky makeup) in Enchanted Island, before retiring at the age of 29.
“I didn’t quit movies,” she remarked. “They quit me.” Nevertheless, she kept active on television in series such as Fantasy Island and The Love Boat, and on stage on Broadway in the revival of Irene, replacing Debbie Reynolds in 1974, as well as in the musicals South Pacific and I Do I Do (both opposite Keel), The Sound of Music, Oklahoma!, My Fair Lady and Carousel, and a one-woman show, The Girl Next Door and How She Grew, the title of her 1988 autobiography.
Born Suzanne Burce in Portland, Oregon, she was the daughter of Eileen (nee Baker) and Paul Burce, who worked in the Wonder Bread factory. She attended dancing school and sang on the radio from an early age. Her role model was the lyrical soprano film star Jeanette MacDonald, who later played her mother in Three Daring Daughters (1948). While on holiday in Los Angeles with her parents, she entered a talent contest, was invited to audition for MGM and was put under contract at the age of 15. She took her professional name from the character of her first film role in 1944.
Powell was married five times; the first four marriages ended in divorce. Her first husband, Geary Steffen, was a figure skater who accompanied Sonja Henie on ice; her last husband was the former child star Dickie Moore, whom she married in 1988 and who died in 2015. She is survived by a son, Geary, two daughters, Suzanne and Lindsey, and two granddaughters.
• Jane Powell, actor and singer, born 1 April 1929; died 16 September 2021
• Ronald Bergan died in 2020
