JANE POWELL
(1 April 1929 - 16 September 2021)
The petite American actress and singer became a movie star, making her screen debut at the age of fifteen. Born in Portland, Oregon, she sang and danced from an early age, performing on a children's radio programme at eight, but in her teens moved to Hollywood and secured a contract with MGM. She had a natural coloratura soprano voice which gave her leading roles in many musicals. Her first feature was Song of the Open Road in 1944 and she went on to do Delightfully Dangerous, Holiday in Mexico and Three Daring Daughters before having the title role in A Date With Judy, with Wallace Beery and Elizabeth Taylor. More musicals included Two Weeks With Love (1950) with Ricardo Montalban, Royal Wedding (1951, replacing Judy Garland) with Fred Astaire, and Rich, Young and Pretty (1951) with Fernando Lamas.
Powell was at MGM in its heyday when the studio turned out musicals week after week. She had a sunny personality that made her popular with audiences who saw her as the girl-next-door. She will be remembered mainly for Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), Stanley Donen's rip-roaring musical with Howard Keel as a backwoodsman bringing home a bride to his six brothers. The film was notable for Michael Kidd's outstanding dance numbers. Powell continued in musicals, including Deep in My Heart, a biopic on the composer Sigmund Romberg played by Jose Ferrer, and Hit the Deck with Tony Martin and Debbie Reynolds. When the musicals dried up, she acted in non-musical films such as The Girl Most Likely, The Female Animal and Enchanted Island, and she ended the 1950s in a television version of Meet Me in St Louis with Tab Hunter and Walter Pidgeon.
Television more or less took over Jane Powell's career from the 1960s and through the 1980s. In 1973 she had replaced Debbie Reynolds in the stage musical of Irene and she did other musical shows including Allegro, The Most Happy Fella, South Pacific, The Sound of Music, Oklahoma!, My Fair Lady, Carousel, and Stephen Sondheim's Bounce. She also had a one-woman show and published her autobiography, The Girl Next Door and How She Grew. In the 1990s Powell came back to TV and her last appearance was in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit in 2002. Finally, she was part of Rick McKay's documentary Broadway: The Golden Age in 2003. Jane Powell had married actor-skater Geary Steffen in 1949 and they have a son, Geary Jr, and a daughter Suzanne. Powell's marriage to Patrick Nerney produced daughter Lindsay and she was also married to James Fitzgerald, David Stellar Parlour and the actor Dickie Moore from 1988 to his death in 2015.
MICHAEL DARVELL