Background
Grable was born on December 18, 1916, in St. Louis, Missouri, the youngest daughter of Leon Grable, an accountant and stockbroker, and Lillian Hoffman, who was the driving force behind her career.
(Two Broadway dance partners rekindle their romance in a s...)
Two Broadway dance partners rekindle their romance in a series of comic misunderstandings set around the backdrop of the Canadian Rockies. Betty Grable, John Payne, Carmen Miranda and Cesar Romero star in this 1942 classic. Shown in 4:3 full frame presentation. When sold by Amazon.com, this product will be manufactured on demand using DVD-R recordable media. Amazon.com's standard return policy will apply.
https://www.amazon.com/SPRINGTIME-ROCKIES-Betty-Grable/dp/B00K8CQ1Q2?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B00K8CQ1Q2
(A premium, 20-Movie Collection of licensed films from Col...)
A premium, 20-Movie Collection of licensed films from Columbia Pictures / Sony Pictures Music in My Heart - (1940) - B&W - Not Rated Rita Hayworth, Tony Martin, Edith Fellows Tonight and Every Night - (1945) - Color - Not Rated Rita Hayworth, Lee Bowman, Marc Platt Down to Earth - (1947) - Color - 101 Minutes - Not Rated Rita Hayworth, Marc Platt, James Gleason Miss Sadie Thompson - (1953) - Color - Not Rated Rita Hayworth, Jose Ferrer, Aldo Ray You ll Never Get Rich - (1941) - B&W - Not Rated Fred Astaire, Rita Hayworth, Robert Benchley My Sister Eileen - (1955) - Color - Not Rated Janet Leigh, Jack Lemmon, Betty Garrett. Time Out for Rhythm - (1941) - B&W - Not Rated Rudy Vallee, Ann Miller, Rosemary Lane, Allen Jenkins, The Three Stooges Three For The Show - (1955) - Color - Not Rated Betty Grable, Marge and Gower Champion, Jack Lemmon Rock Around the Clock - (1956) - B&W - Not Rated Bill Haley and the Comets, The Platters, Alan Freed, Ernie Freeman Combo A Song to Remember - (1945) - Color - Not Rated Cornel Wilde, Merle Oberon, Paul Muni The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T - (1953) - Color - Rated G Tommy Rettig, Mary Healy, Hans Conried Let's Do It Again - (1953) - Color - Not Rated Jane Wyman, Ray Milland, Aldo Ray, Leon Ames Carolina Blues - (1944) - B&W - Not Rated Ken Kyser, Ann Miller, Victor Moore, Jeff Donnell Slightly French - (1949) - B&W - Not Rated Dorothy Lamour, Don Ameche, Janis Carter, Willard Parker You Can't Run Away From It - (1956) - Color - Not Rated June Allyson, Jack Lemmon, Charles Bickford, Jim Backus Hot Blood - (1956) - Color - Not Rated Jane Russell, Cornel Wilde, Luther Adler, Joseph Calleia Idol on Parade - (1959) - B&W - Not Rated William Bendix, Anthony Newley, Anne Aubrey, Lionel Jeffries The Heat's On - (1943) - B&W - Not Rated Mae West, Victor Moore, William Gaxton, Lloyd Bridges Saddles and Sagebrush - (1943) - B&W - Not Rated Russell Hayden, Dub Taylor, Ann Savage, Bob Wills & The Texas Playboys Bonanza Town - (1951) - B&W - Not Rated Charles Starrett, Fred Sears, Smiley Burnette, Myron Healey
https://www.amazon.com/Musical-Movie-Collection-Rita-Hayworth/dp/B01MY7SB4V?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B01MY7SB4V
(Betty Grable in the role that she made famous throughout ...)
Betty Grable in the role that she made famous throughout World War II. A classic musical romance with Martha Raye and Joe E. Brown.
https://www.amazon.com/Pin-Up-Girl-Betty-Grable/dp/B000BZISU8?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B000BZISU8
(Dan Dailey and Betty Grable star as a young man and woman...)
Dan Dailey and Betty Grable star as a young man and woman, whom team up as performers during the age of vaudeville and soon fall in love. The story of their rise to fame, and the subsequent professional and personal setbacks, is told in flashback and set against a rousing musical score. When sold by Amazon.com, this product will be manufactured on demand using DVD-R recordable media. Amazon.com's standard return policy will apply.
https://www.amazon.com/Mother-Wore-Tights-Betty-Grable/dp/B00IELX388?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B00IELX388
(Disk 1: MY BLUE HEAVEN Disk 2: THE DOLLY SISTERS Disk 3: ...)
Disk 1: MY BLUE HEAVEN Disk 2: THE DOLLY SISTERS Disk 3: MOON OVER MIAMI Disk 4: DOWN ARGENTINE WAY
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dancer singer actress pin-up girl
Grable was born on December 18, 1916, in St. Louis, Missouri, the youngest daughter of Leon Grable, an accountant and stockbroker, and Lillian Hoffman, who was the driving force behind her career.
Grable was educated at the Mary Institute, an exclusive girl's school in St. Louis, and later at the Hollywood Professional School, which taught child actors on the movie set. At an early age, her mother arranged toe, tap, ballet, and acrobatic dancing lessons for her, as well as training in voice and saxophone. When she was five, Grable danced and played the saxophone on a local stage in St. Louis, performing about the same time in public ballet. Her mother coached her on a small dance platform at home, enforcing practice sessions during vacations, and introduced her to theatrical folk on tour.
The Grables visited Hollywood during their vacation in the summer of 1928. In the spring of 1929, at Lillian's insistence, they moved with their daughters to California seeking Betty's big break. Grable's first opportunity came at Twentieth Century-Fox, where she was hired as a dancer and singer. She appeared in the film Happy Days (1929) at age thirteen, and in Let's Go Places (1930) while singing with orchestras and remaining a member of the Goldwyn Chorus girls. Her mother, always seeking publicity, enrolled Grable in amateur-night performances, booked her for private parties and benefits, secured bit parts for her under the name Frances Dean, and wooed directors for her. Grable gained visibility dancing in RKO's The Gay Divorcee (1934), performing a specialty dance number that landed her a studio contract. In the period 1935-1936, she appeared in a series of Paramount movies featuring her as "Betty Coed" that included the films Collegiate, Pigskin Parade, College Swing, and Campus Confessions. She turned down parts she felt were not in keeping with her style or image, favoring lowbrow to highbrow films, light to heavy story lines, fanciful to realistic roles, and romantic to woeful scripts. Her robust health and peaches-and-cream complexion made her perfect for the role of college sweetheart, even though she never graduated from high school herself. She was careful about interviews and preferred to be given the questions in advance. Her big break came when Darryl Zanuck noticed her photo in a Los Angeles newspaper in 1939. She was doing a show with Jack Haley at the San Francisco Exposition at the time, and this exposure led her to a part in the Broadway musical, Du Barry Was a Lady (1939) with Ethel Merman. Haley had arranged for some publicity shots of Grable to be taken which appeared in the paper. Zanuck re-signed her with Fox, and she had a job waiting for her when she finished the musical. Returning from Broadway with good reviews, Grable landed the lead in Down Argentine Way (1940) when the original lead, Alice Faye, became ill. The film was such a success, that Grable and Faye subsequently shared top billing in Tin Pan Alley (1940). Her pictures were financial successes, so studio producers felt no risk in filming in technicolor, which raised production costs by one-third. This allowed her hair and skin to shine, and her overall image to be saftig. Technicolor musicals starring Grable included Footlight Serenade (1942), Springtime in the Rockies (1942), and Four Jills in a Jeep (1944). During World War II she became the serviceman's favorite pinup girl and was being labeled "the world's most popular blonde. " Perhaps best known for her saucy bathing-suit photo looking over her shoulder in high heels, she was the darling of American GI's who requested three million copies of her picture. In 1941, she appeared in Manhattan wearing a sweater knitted for her by the British Royal Air Force. Each week she received more than 10, 000 fan letters. Her famous legs were insured by Lloyd's of London for a million dollars and immortalized after being pressed into cement outside Grauman's Chinese theatre. Between 1942 and 1951 Betty Grable was among the ten top box-office draws, according to an annual poll of exhibitors conducted by both the Fame Annual and the Motion Picture Herald, and she drew an annual salary of between $200, 000 and $300, 000. In 1942, as a newcomer, Grable placed eighth among such idols as Abbott and Costello, Mickey Rooney, and Clark Gable. In 1947 Grable earned $208, 000, less than in previous years, but still ahead of Henry Ford II, president of Ford Motor Company. In the 1940's she was Hollywood's highest-paid woman by far, judged Time in 1949, and although she was down from her pinnacle, she remained "the best paid woman in the U. S. " She was careful about her costars and dance partners: Victor Mature's masculine body matched Grable's feminine charms in the limited attire worn in Song of the Islands (1942); Dan Dailey, her first dance partner who co-starred with her in Mother Wore Tights (1947) and My Blue Heaven (1950), matched her spirited, intricate dance steps, toe-to-toe. This type of romantic musical proved to be the mother lode for Fox, with Grable's movies making profits of more than $15 million during the period 1940-1948. Nostalgia worked well in such Grable films as Sweet Rosie O'Grady (1943), an 1880's period piece costarring Robert Young, wherein she sang "My Heart Tells Me" (in a wooden bathtub) as well as "Rosie, " "Waiting at the Church, " and "Going to the Country Fair. " Grable's movies were fun, offering escape and romance. Her film Coney Island (1943) received rave reviews. In her starring roles, Betty Grable always got her man. The strong female characters she played talked back saucily to men, were not taken in by smoothies, and were both willful and determined. Both sexes admired her sense of independence. Americans sensed that Grable was working patriotically on the home front to buoy wartime spirits. Her image perfectly paralleled the decade in which she starred, calling for confidence, competence, hard work, and a competitive spirit. Her character was modeled by a flinty perseverance that paid off in stardom. Grable films by this time were big-budget, lavish, vividly colored, always good-humored, and often preposterous. Women enjoyed Betty Grable as much as men; both longed for romance, fun, happy endings, fulfillment of dreams. As the postwar period ended in the 1950's, Grable moved on to Wabash Avenue (1950) and How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), co-starring with Marilyn Monroe and Lauren Bacall. Monroe's career was rising as Grable's was diminishing. Her last film was How to Be Very, Very Popular (1955), and she revived her career temporarily with a nightclub act that starred her with Dan Dailey in Las Vegas in a brief version of Guys and Dolls (1962). She bought a home in Las Vegas, periodically returning to California to appear in TV-produced movies during the late 1950's and 1960's. Grable died of lung cancer in Santa Monica, California, on July 2, 1973.
(A premium, 20-Movie Collection of licensed films from Col...)
(Two Broadway dance partners rekindle their romance in a s...)
(Dan Dailey and Betty Grable star as a young man and woman...)
(Disk 1: MY BLUE HEAVEN Disk 2: THE DOLLY SISTERS Disk 3: ...)
(Betty Grable in the role that she made famous throughout ...)
Grable remained in good physical shape from the exercise that her dance routine gave her; her clear-eyed, carefully nurtured health and radiance were captured on screen and her platinum hair set off her rosy pink skin. Her stamina allowed her to work long hours without visibly tiring and perform strenuous song-and-dance routines time and time again to create the one perfect take.
Upon turning twenty-one, Grable married former child-star Jackie Coogan; they divorced in 1940, shortly after Grable's career took off. In 1943, she married bandleader-trumpeter Harry James; they had two daughters. They were married for twenty-two years before divorcing in 1965.