Jeannette MacDonald

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Jeannette MacDonald was an American soprano and also one of MGM's major movie stars during the 1930s. The musicals in which she appeared with the baritone Nelson Eddy were often some of the top box-office champions of their respective years.

She was born on June 18, 1903 in Philadelphia into a musical family who toured the country with a vaudeville act. She began a singing career early, touring with her family in musical revues, finally landing on Broadway in 1919. After a decade of performing in Broadway shows, she was tapped by Ernst Lubitsch to star in the musical film The Love Parade. In Hollywood, her image was under great scrutiny; the publicity department at Paramount changed her birth date to 1907 to make her seem younger, while she was placed in movies that showed her as sexually risky. Scenes found her in bathtubs with bubbles strategically placed to maintain her modesty. Time magazine, in a review of her work in Annabelle's Affairs (1931), said she "undresses well."

These early films contrast greatly with the wholesome, innocent image crafted by MGM after 1934 when Irving Thalberg hired her. A string of films began that would cement her as one of the most important musical performers in Hollywood. The Merry Widow (1934) with Maurice Chevalier, a former costar from Paramount, was a critical success, and fame would continue with San Francisco (1936, with Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy) and Naughty Marietta (1935), her first pairing with Nelson Eddy. This pairing would endure for seven more films, including Rose Marie (with an appearance by a young Jimmy Stewart), Maytime, and their final film together, I Married an Angel (1942).

After her marriage to fellow actor Gene Raymond in 1948, MacDonald ended her film career with an appearance in a Lassie movie calledThe Sun Comes Up. She continued concert tours into the 1950s, often reprising operatic roles in Gounod's Romeo and Juliet and Faust. MacDonald died on January 14, 1965 in Houston, prior to having heart surgery.