Marie McDonald
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Marie McDonald (July 6, 1923 – October 21, 1965) was an American singer and actress born with the name Cora Marie Frye in Burgin, Kentucky. She was the daughter of a Ziegfeld Follies girl who divorced her father when she was a child and she eventually moved with her mother and stepfather to Yonkers, New York. In her early teens Cora Frye began doing modeling work and was signed by the prominent John Robert Powers Agency in New York City. Nicknamed "The Body" because of her shapely physique, she was only seventeen years old when she landed a showgirl role in a 1940 Broadway production at the Earl Carroll Theatre called Earl Carroll's Vanities. Shortly thereafter, she moved to Hollywood hoping to develop a career in show business. She continued to work for the owner of the Broadway theatre as a showgirl at his Sunset Boulevard nightclub.
Marie McDonald's singing voice brought work with Tommy Dorsey & His Orchestra on his radio show and she later performed with other Big bands. Seen as a multi-talented young star, in 1942 she was put under contract by Universal Studios and immediately appeared in several minor roles. The following year she co-starred in A Scream in the Dark, a "B" detective mystery for Republic Pictures that met with reasonable success. However, that would be it as far as starring roles until 1945 when she worked for a small independent production company in another "B" film called Getting Gertie's Garter.
During the Second World War, McDonald was a volunteer pin-up girl for the United States military magazine, YANK. She had married for the first time in 1940 but bad relationships, alcohol, drugs, and bouts of depression made her an unreliable employee for the studios. In all, she married seven times, including twice to Harry Karl who later married and bankrupted Debbie Reynolds. Between 1945 and 1950 she appeared in only two films and then again not until 1958 when she was cast in a slapstick comedy opposite Jerry Lewis in The Geisha Boy . Eight years later the 40-year-old McDonald made her last appearance in a "spicy" film, Promises! Promises!, that featured a topless Jayne Mansfield.
In 1965 at Calabasas, California, 42-year-old Marie McDonald ended her own life with a drug overdose. She was put to rest in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California with her last husband, Donald F. Taylor.
It is unclear whether Marie committed suicide or whether her death was accidental. Her husband committed suicide in January 1966. Marie's three children were raised by Harry Karl and his new wife, Debbie Reynolds.
