Deanna Durbin

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Birth name Edna May Durbin
Nationality Canada
Birth 4 december 1921 at Winnipeg (Canada)
Death 20 april 2013 (at 91 years) at Paris (France)
Awards Academy Juvenile Award

Edna Mae Durbin (December 4, 1921 – c. April 20, 2013), known professionally as Deanna Durbin, was a Canadian-born American actress and singer, who appeared in musical films in the 1930s and 1940s, her singing voice being variously described as being light but full, sweet and unaffected. With the technical skill and vocal range of a legitimate lyric soprano, she performed everything from popular standards to operatic arias.

Durbin made her first film appearance with Judy Garland in Every Sunday (1936), and subsequently signed a contract with Universal Studios. Her success as the ideal teenage daughter in films such as Three Smart Girls (1936) was credited with saving the studio from bankruptcy. In 1938, at the age of 17, Durbin was awarded the Academy Juvenile Award.

As she matured Durbin grew dissatisfied with the girl-next-door roles assigned to her, and attempted to portray a more womanly and sophisticated style. The film noir Christmas Holiday (1944) and the whodunit Lady on a Train (1945) were, however, not as well received as her musical-comedies and romances had been.

Durbin retired from acting and singing in 1949, and withdrew from public life. She married film producer-director Charles Henri David in 1950, and the couple moved to a farmhouse near Paris.

Biography

Durbin married an assistant director, Vaughn Paul, in 1941; the couple divorced in 1943. Her second marriage, to film writer-producer-actor Felix Jackson in 1945, produced a daughter, Jessica Louise Jackson, but a divorce followed in 1949.

In Paris on December 21, 1950, shortly after her 29th birthday, Deanna Durbin married Charles David, the producer-director of both French and American pictures who had guided her through Lady on a Train (1945). Durbin and David raised two children: Jessica (from her second marriage, to Felix Jackson) and Peter (from her union with David).

Over the years, Durbin resisted numerous offers to perform again. In 1951, Durbin was invited to play in London's West End production of Kiss Me Kate, and in the MGM film version of the same in 1953, and Sigmund Romberg's operetta The Student Prince in 1954, and was reportedly Alan Jay Lerner's first choice to portray Eliza Doolittle in the 1956 Broadway cast of My Fair Lady. Suggestions that Durbin sing at major Las Vegas casinos also went unfulfilled.

In 1983, film historian David Shipman was granted a rare interview by Durbin. In the interview, she steadfastly asserted her right to privacy and maintained it until the end of her life, declining to be profiled on websites.

Durbin made it known that she did not like the Hollywood studio system. She emphasized that she never identified herself with the public image that the media created around her. She spoke of the Deanna "persona" in the third person, and considered the film character "Deanna Durbin" to be a by-product of her youth and not her true identity.

Durbin's husband of more than 48 years, Charles David, died in Paris on March 1, 1999.

On April 30, 2013, a newsletter published by the Deanna Durbin Society reported that Durbin died "in the past few days", quoting her son, Peter H. David, who thanked her admirers for respecting her privacy. No other details were given. According to a family friend, Durbin died on or about April 20 in Neauphle-le-Château, France.