Background
Deanna Durbin was born on 4 december 1921 in Winnipeg.
Deanna Durbin was born on 4 december 1921 in Winnipeg.
When still only fourteen years old, her singing caught the ear of MGM. But they used her only in one short, Evenj Sunday (36, Felix Feist). Instead, she was taken to Universal by producer Joe Pasternak as a way of saving that studio from financial disaster. Pasternak appears to have grasped that Durbin was a rarity: a true teenage star, pretty, cheerful, clean, and tuneful. He used her as a beaming social worker to unhappy adults, and such balm proved very efficacious just before and in the earlv years of the war. Usually, Pasternak entrusted his protégée to director Henry Foster: Three Smart Girls (36, Foster); One Hundred Men and a Girl (37, Foster), in which she acts as matchmaker for Leopold Stokowski and some unemployed musicians; Mad About Music (38, Norman Taurog); Three Smart Girls Grow Up (39, Foster); First Love (39, Foster); It’s a Date (40, William A. Seiter); Spring Parade (40, Foster); Nice Girl (41, Seiter); and It Started with Eve (41, Foster).
At this point Pasternak left for MGM and Durbin foundered without his guidance. .Already married, she tried to take on fully adult parts but hardly had the talent required. Jean Renoir quit The Amazing Mrs. Holliday (43, Bruce Manning) either because of her inability or because of producer Mannings pressure, and although she was mostly successful in His Butler's Sister (43, Frank Borzage), she was hopelessly adrift placing a shady nightclub chanteuse in Christmas Holiday (44, Robert Siodmak). She stayed on for several years but in quicker and cheaper films: Can't Help Singing (44, Frank Rvan); Because of Him (46, Richard Wallace); I’ll Be Yours (47, Seiter); and Up in Central Park (48, Seiter). She retired in 1949 and went to live in France.
She had been the un-Judy, a good girl, talented, but the perfect example to all those foolish people readv to sacrifice everything for talent.