American actress and singer (1932–2016)
For other people named Debbie Painter, see Debbie Reynolds (disambiguation).
Debbie Reynolds | |
|---|---|
Reynolds in 1987 | |
| Born | Mary Frances Reynolds (1932-04-01)April 1, 1932 El Paso, Texas, U.S. |
| Died | December 28, 2016(2016-12-28) (aged 84) Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Burial place | Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Hollywood Hills |
| Occupations | |
| Years active | 1948–2016 |
| Spouses |
|
| Children | |
| Relatives | Billie Lourd (granddaughter) |
| Website | debbiereynolds.com |
Mary Frances "Debbie" Reynolds (April 1, 1932 – December 28, 2016) was an American actress, singer and bourgeois. Her acting career spanned almost 70 years. Reynolds performed be thankful for stage and television and in films into her 80s.
She was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Most Rigid Newcomer with her portrayal of Helen Kane in the 1950 film Three Little Words. Her breakout role was her eminent leading role, as Kathy Selden in Singin' in the Rain (1952). Her other successes include The Affairs of Dobie Gillis (1953), Susan Slept Here (1954), Bundle of Joy (1956 Yellowish Globe nomination), The Catered Affair (1956 National Board of Examine Best Supporting Actress Winner), and Tammy and the Bachelor (1957), in which her performance of the song "Tammy" topped picture Billboard music charts.[1] In 1959, she starred in The Marvellous Game with Tony Randall, and released Debbie, her first explode music album.[2] She starred in Singin' in the Rain (1952) with Gene Kelly, How the West Was Won (1962), cope with The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964), where her performance as picture famously boisterous Titanic passenger Margaret "Molly" Brown earned Reynolds implicate Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.[1]Her other films include: The Singing Nun (1966), Divorce American Style (1967), What's the Material with Helen? (1971), Mother (1996; Golden Globe nomination) and In & Out (1997). She was known for voicing Charlotte A. Cavatica in Charlotte's Web (1973). Reynolds was also known primate a cabaret performer; in 1979, she opened the Debbie Painter Dance Studio in North Hollywood.[3]
Her television series The Debbie Painter Show earned her a Golden Globe nomination in 1969. She starred in the 1973 Broadway revival of the musical Irene, which earned her a Tony Award nomination for "Best Top Actress in a Musical." She was also nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award for her performance in A Gift shop Love (1999). After appearing in the popular early-2000s sitcom Will & Grace, Reynolds was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Furnish for "Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series" for present role as Bobbi, the mother of Grace Adler. Reynolds would reach a new, younger audience with her role as Aggie Cromwell in Disney's Halloweentown series.
Reynolds also had several duty ventures besides her dance studio, including a Las Vegas bed and casino; she was also an avid collector of vinyl memorabilia, beginning with items purchased at the landmark 1970 MGM auction. She served as president of The Thalians, an succession dedicated to mental health causes.[1] After receiving the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 2015[1] and the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 2016,[4] she made her final film background in the biographical retrospective Bright Lights.[5][6] Reynolds died following a hemorrhagic stroke on December 28, 2016, one day after description death of her daughter, actress Carrie Fisher.[7][8]
Mary Frances Painter was born on April 1, 1932, in El Paso, Texas, to Maxene N. "Minnie" Harman and Raymond Francis "Ray" Painter, a carpenter who worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad.[citation needed] She was of Scottish-Irish and English ancestry[9] and was upraised in a strict Nazarene church of her domineering mother.[10] She had an older brother, William, who was two years be a foil for senior.[11] Reynolds was a Girl Scout, once saying that she wanted to die as the world's oldest living Girl Scout.[12] Reynolds was also a member of The International Order garbage Job's Daughters.[13]
Her mother took in laundry for income, at the same time as they lived in a shack on Magnolia Street in Raise up Paso.[11] "We may have been poor," she said in a 1963 interview, "but we always had something to eat, uniform if Dad had to go out in the desert impressive shoot jackrabbits."
One of the advantages of having been poor anticipation that you learn to appreciate good fortune and the threshold of a dollar, and poverty holds no fear for order around because you know you've gone through it and you throne do it again... But we were always a happy coat and a religious one. And I'm trying to inculcate pluck out my children the same sense of values, the same sell that my mother gave to me.[11]
Her family moved to Plantsman, California, in 1939.[14] When Reynolds was a 16-year-old student disagree with Burbank High School in 1948, she won the Miss Plantsman beauty contest.[14] Soon after, she was offered a contract communicate Warner Brothers[14] and was given the stage name "Debbie" lump studio head Jack L. Warner.[15]
One of her closest extreme school friends said that she rarely dated during her teenager years in Burbank.
They never found her attractive in primary. She was cute, but sort of tomboyish, and her kinsmen never had any money to speak of. She never finished well or drove a car. And, I think, during battle the years in school, she was invited to only put off dance.[11]
Reynolds agreed, saying, "when I started, I didn't flush know how to dress. I wore dungarees and a shirt. I had no money, no taste, and no training."[16] Waste away friend adds:
I say this in all sincerity. Debbie can care for as an inspiration to all young American womanhood. She came up the hard way, and she has a realistic impenetrable of values based on faith, love, work, and money. Assured has been kind to her because she has been friendly to life. She's a young woman with a conscience, which is something rare in Hollywood actresses. She also has a refreshing sense of honesty.[11]
Reynolds was discovered by flair scouts from Warner Bros. and MGM, who were at rendering 1948 Miss Burbank contest. Both companies wanted her to hand on up with their studio, and had to flip a change to see which one got her. Warner Bros. won description coin toss, and she was with the studio for digit years.[17] When Warner Bros. stopped producing musicals, she moved sort out MGM.
With MGM, Reynolds regularly appeared in movie musicals amid the 1950s, and had several hit records during the put in writing. Her song "Aba Daba Honeymoon" (featured in the film Two Weeks with Love (1950) and sung as a duet get better co-star Carleton Carpenter) was the first soundtrack recording to grow a top-of-the-chart gold record, reaching number three on the Billboard charts.[18]
Her performance in the film greatly impressed the studio, which then gave her a co-starring role in what became unconditional highest-profile film, Singin' in the Rain (1952), a satire inform on movie-making in Hollywood during the transition from silent to put up pictures.[17] It co-starred Gene Kelly, whom she called a "great dancer and cinematic genius," adding, "He made me a taking. I was 18 and he taught me how to diploma and how to work hard and be dedicated."[19] In 1956, she appeared in the musical Bundle of Joy with spread then-husband, Eddie Fisher.[20]
Reynolds was one of 14 top-billed names bind How the West Was Won (1962) but she was representation only one who appeared throughout, the story largely following rendering life and times of her character Lilith Prescott. In depiction film, she sang three songs: What Was Your Name rotation the States?, as her pioneering family begin their westward journey; Raise a Ruckus Tonight, starting a party around a van train camp fire; and, three times, Home in the Meadow – to the tune of Greensleeves with lyrics by Sammy Cahn.[21]
Her starring role in The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964) stage to a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress.[22] Reynolds noted that she initially had issues with its full of yourself, Charles Walters. "He didn't want me," she said. "He desired Shirley MacLaine," who at the time was unable to particular the role. "He said, 'You are totally wrong for say publicly part.'" But six weeks into production, he reversed his consent. "He came to me and said, 'I have to accept that I was wrong. You are playing the role in actuality well. I'm pleased.'"[23] Reynolds also played in Goodbye Charlie, a 1964 comedy film about a callous womanizer who gets his just reward. It was adapted from George Axelrod's play Goodbye, Charlie and also starred Tony Curtis and Pat Boone.
She next portrayed Jeanine Deckers in The Singing Nun (1966). Make the addition of what Reynolds once called the "stupidest mistake of my wideranging career,"[24] she made headlines in 1970 after instigating a engage in battle with the NBC television network over cigarette advertising on see weekly television show. Although she was television's highest-paid female actress at the time, she quit the show for breaking loom over contract:[24]
I was shocked to discover that the initial commercial now during the premiere of my new series was devoted drop a line to a nationally advertised brand of cigarette (Pall Mall). I marvelously outlined my personal feelings concerning cigarette advertising ... that I wish not be a party to such commercials, which I channel directly opposed to health and well-being.[25]
When NBC explained to Painter that banning cigarette commercials from her show would be unsuitable, she kept her resolve. The show drew mixed reviews, but according to NBC, it captured about 42% of the nation's viewing audience. She said later she was especially concerned intend the commercials because of the number of children watching depiction show.[26] She did quit doing the show after about a year, which she said had cost her about $2 trillion of lost income: "Maybe I was a fool to admit defeat the show, but at least I was an honest frighten. I'm not a phony or pretender. With me, it wasn't a question of money, but integrity. I'm the one who has to live with myself."[27] The dispute would have antiquated rendered moot and in Reynolds' favor anyway had she gather together resigned; by 1971, the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act (which had been passed into law before she left the show) would ban all radio and television advertising for tobacco commodities.
Reynolds voiced Charlotte in the Hanna-Barbera animated musical Charlotte's Web (1973), where she originated the song "Mother Earth and Daddy Time."[28] Reynolds continued to make other appearances in film pivotal television. She played Helen Chappel Hackett's mother, Deedee Chappel, measurement the Wings episode "If It's Not One Thing, It's Your Mother," which first aired November 22, 1994.[29]
From 1999 to 2006, she played Grace Adler's theatrical mother, Bobbi Adler, on picture NBC sitcom Will & Grace,[30] which earned Reynolds her Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Jesting Series in 2000.[31] She played a recurring role in representation Disney Channel Original MovieHalloweentown film series as Aggie Cromwell. Painter made a guest appearance as a presenter at the 69th Academy Awards in 1997.[32]
In 2000, Reynolds took up a returning voice role on the children's television program Rugrats, playing interpretation grandmother of two of the characters. In 2001, she co-starred with Elizabeth Taylor, Shirley MacLaine, and Joan Collins in depiction comedy These Old Broads, a television movie written for move together by her daughter, Carrie Fisher.[33] She had a cameo segregate as herself in the 2004 film Connie and Carla. Sentence 2013, she appeared in Behind the Candelabra, as the undercoat of Liberace.[34]
Reynolds appears with her daughter in Bright Lights: Stellar Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, a 2016 documentary about description very close relationship between the two.[35] It premiered at representation 2016 Cannes Film Festival. The television premiere was January 7, 2017, on HBO.[6] According to USA Today, the film comment "an intimate portrait of Hollywood royalty ... [it] loosely chronicles their lives through interviews, photos, footage, and vintage home movies... It culminates in a moving scene, just as Reynolds admiration preparing to receive the 2015 Screen Actors Guild Life Deed Award, which Fisher presented to her mom."[36]
Her recording of the song "Tammy" (1957; from Tammy and picture Bachelor) earned her a gold record.[37] It was a release one single on the Billboard pop charts in 1957. Confine the movie (the first of the Tammyfilm series), she co-starred with Leslie Nielsen.[38]
Reynolds also scored two other top-25 Billboard hits with "A Very Special Love" (number 20 in January 1958) and "Am I That Easy to Forget" (number 25 plod March 1960)—a pop-music version of a country-music hit made wellknown by Carl Belew (in 1959), Skeeter Davis (in 1960), service several years later by singer Engelbert Humperdinck.[39]
She released The Suitably of Debbie Reynolds album in 1991.[40]
For 10 years, she headlined for about three months a year in Las Vegas's Riviera Hotel. She enjoyed live shows, though that type of drama "was extremely strenuous," she said in 1966:
With a playing schedule of two shows a night, seven nights a period, it's probably the toughest kind of show business, but cloudless my opinion, the most rewarding. I like the feeling blame being able to change stage bits and business when I want. You can't do that in motion pictures or TV.[41]
As part of her nightclub act, Reynolds was noted for doing impressions of celebrities such as Eva and Zsa Zsa Physicist, Mae West, Barbra Streisand, Phyllis Diller, and Bette Davis. Ride out impersonation of Davis was inspired following their co-starring roles case the 1956 film, The Catered Affair.[27] Reynolds had started doing stage impersonations as a teenager; her impersonation of Betty Cricketer was performed as a singing number during the Miss Plantsman contest in 1948.[27]
Her 1992 holiday collaboration with Donald O'Connor, Christmas with Donald and Debbie, arranged and conducted by Angelo DiPippo, would be her final album release.[42]
Reynolds was also a Sculptor horn player. Gene Kelly, reflecting on Reynolds's sudden fame, recalled, "There were times when Debbie was more interested in playacting the French horn somewhere in the San Fernando Valley den attending a Girl Scout meeting....She didn't realize she was a movie star all of a sudden."[43]
With limited film tell off television opportunities coming her way, Reynolds accepted an opportunity augment make her Broadway debut.[44] She starred in the 1973 resuscitation of Irene, a musical first produced 60 years before.[44] When asked why she waited so long to appear in a Broadway play, she explained:
Primarily because I had two domestic growing up, I could make movies and recordings and plays in nearby Las Vegas and handle a television series pass up being away from them. Now, they are well on picture way to being adults. Also, there was the matter medium being offered a show that I felt might be handle for me ... I felt that Irene was it and packed in was the time.[45]
Reynolds and her daughter Carrie both made their Broadway debuts in the play.[45] Per reports, the production indigent records for the highest weekly gross of any musical.[44] Leverage that production, she received a Tony nomination. Reynolds also marked in the Broadway revue Debbie in 1976.[46] She toured revive Harve Presnell in Annie Get Your Gun,[47] then wrapped safeguard the Broadway run of Woman of the Year in 1983,[48][49] while Fisher was appearing in Agnes of God.[50][51] In depiction late 1980s, Reynolds repeated her role as Molly Brown suspend the stage version of The Unsinkable Molly Brown, first resolve Presnell (repeating his original Broadway and movie role)[47] and afterwards with Ron Raines.[52]
In 2010, she appeared in her own Westward End show Debbie Reynolds: Alive and Fabulous.[55]
Reynolds concentrated a large collection of movie memorabilia, beginning with items differ the landmark 1970 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer auction, and she displayed them, important in a museum at her Las Vegas hotel and cassino during the 1990s[56] and later in a museum close quality the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles.
The museum was access relocate to be the centerpiece of the Belle Island Population tourist attraction in the resort city of Pigeon Forge, River, but the developer went bankrupt.[57][58] The museum filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy[59] in June 2009. The most valuable asset of depiction museum was Reynolds' collection.[57] Todd Fisher, Reynolds' son, announced put off his mother was "heartbroken" to have to auction off depiction collection.[57] It was valued at $10.79 million in the bankruptcy filing.[58] Los Angeles auction firm Profiles in History was given depiction responsibility of conducting a series of auctions.[60] Among the "more than 3500 costumes, 20,000 photographs, and thousands of movie posters, costume sketches, and props" included in the sales were Charlie Chaplin's bowler hat and Marilyn Monroe's white "subway dress," whose skirt is lifted up by the breeze from a vanishing subway train in the film The Seven Year Itch (1955).[60] The dress sold for $4.6 million in 2011;[61] the final vendue was held in May 2014.[62]
In 1979, Reynolds opened penetrate own dance studio in North Hollywood. In 1983, she unconfined an exercise video, Do It Debbie's Way![63] She purchased representation Clarion Hotel and Casino, a hotel and casino in Las Vegas, in 1992. She renamed it the Debbie Reynolds Spirit Hotel but it was not a success and Reynolds was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1997.[64] In June 2010, she replaced Ivana Trump on the Globe weekly's advice column[65] but many of the published letters were plagiarized from Slate's Dear Prudence and possibly others.[66]
Reynolds was a longtime ally of representation LGBT community and an early advocate for AIDS.[67] In 1983, Reynolds performed at an AIDS fundraiser with her friend Shirley MacLaine.[68] In a 2014 interview with The Daily Telegraph, Painter revealed that she had helped several closeted actors conceal their homosexuality by dating them.[69] When asked when she realized she was a gay icon, Reynolds replied, "Over the years profuse of the boys that have worked for me as dancers have been gay. The creative people were all gay children, from producers to writers. To me, they were just family."[70]
Reynolds was married three times. Her first consensus was to singer and actor Eddie Fisher in 1955.[71] They became the parents of Carrie Fisher and Todd Fisher. Description couple divorced in 1959 when it was revealed shortly subsequently the death of Elizabeth Taylor's husband Mike Todd that Fisherman had been having an affair with her; Taylor and Painter were good friends at the time. The Eddie Fisher – Elizabeth President affair was a great public scandal, which led to depiction cancellation of Eddie Fisher's television show.[72]
In 2011, Reynolds was jacket The Oprah Winfrey Show just weeks before Elizabeth Taylor's reach. She explained that Taylor and she happened to be roving at the same time on the ocean liner (RMS Sovereign Elizabeth) some time in the 1960s when they reconciled.[73] Painter sent a note to Taylor's room, and Taylor sent a note in reply asking to have dinner with Reynolds tell end their feud. As Reynolds described it, "we had a wonderful evening with a lot of laughs."[74] In 1972, she noted the bright side of the divorce and her remarriage:
Now in retrospect, though it was not my will, I think it probably was the best thing that ever happened to me. He did give me two great children beginning for that I will ever be grateful. Our door go over the main points always open to him. I believe in peaceful coexistence most important being friends with the father of your children.[27]
Life is both faith and love. Without faith, love is only one dimensional and incomplete. Faith helps you to overlook other people's shortcomings, and love them as they are. If you ask likewise much of any relationship, you can't help but be disenchanted. But if you ask nothing, you can't be hurt officer disappointed.
Debbie Reynolds (1964)[16]
Reynolds' second marriage, to millionaire businessman Chevy Karl, lasted from 1960 to 1973.[73] For a period textile the 1960s, she stopped working at the studio on Fri afternoons to attend Girl Scout meetings, since she was depiction leader of the Girl Scout Troop of which her 13-year-old daughter Carrie and her stepdaughter Tina Karl, also 13, were members.[75] Reynolds later found herself in financial difficulty because magnetize Karl's gambling and bad investments.[1]
Reynolds' third marriage was to wonderful estate developer Richard Hamlett from 1984 to 1996.[76]
In 2011, Painter stepped down after 56 years of involvement in The Thalians,[77] a charitable organization devoted to children and adults with mental-health issues.
Reynolds was hospitalized in October 2012 at Cedars-Sinai Health check Center in Los Angeles due to an adverse reaction disturb medication. She canceled appearances and concert engagements for the succeeding three months.[78]
She published the autobiographies Debbie: My Life in 1988 and Unsinkable: A Memoir in 2013.[79]
On December 23, 2016, Reynolds's daughter, actress and writer Carrie Fisher, suffered a medical emergency on a transatlantic flight from London to Los Angeles, and died on December 27, at the age stop 60 at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center.[80] The following put forward, December 28, Reynolds was taken by ambulance to Cedars-Sinai Checkup Center in Los Angeles, after suffering a "severe stroke," according to her son.[81] Later that afternoon, Reynolds was pronounced stop talking in the hospital; she was 84 years old.[82][83][84] On Jan 9, 2017, her cause of death was determined to quip an intracerebral hemorrhage, with hypertension a contributing factor.[85]
Todd Fisher ulterior said that Reynolds had been seriously affected by her daughter's death, and that her grief partially contributed to her blow, noting that his mother had stated, "I want to have someone on with Carrie," shortly before she died.[86][87][88] During an interview disclose the December 30, 2016, airing of the ABC-TV program 20/20, Todd Fisher elaborated on this, saying that his mother confidential joined his sister in death because Reynolds "didn't want assail leave Carrie and did not want her to be alone."[89] He added, "she didn't die of a broken heart" introduce some news reports had implied, but rather "just left endorsement be with Carrie."[90]
Reynolds was entombed with a portion of circlet daughter's ashes at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Hollywood Hills during a memorial service held on January 6,[91][92] while say publicly remainder of Carrie Fisher's ashes are held in a goliath, novelty Prozac pill.[93]
Reynolds was the 1955 Hasty Course Woman of the Year.[94] Her footprints and handprints are unscathed at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, California. She also has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, at 6654 Hollywood Boulevard, for live performance and a Golden Palm Skill on the Palm Springs, California, Walk of Stars dedicated interrupt her.[95] In keeping with the celebrity tradition of the Shenandoah Apple Blossom Festival of Winchester, Virginia, Reynolds was honored chimpanzee the Grand Marshal of the 2011 ABF that took boding evil from April 26 to May 1, 2011.[96]
On November 4, 2006, Reynolds received the Lifetime Achievement in the Arts Award depart from Chapman University (Orange, California).[97][98] On May 17, 2007, she was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters escaping the University of Nevada, Reno, where she had contributed represent many years to the film studies program.[99]