Tamara Drasin
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Tamara Drasin (born Sorochintsï, Ukraine, circa 1905, died near Lisbon, Portugal, March 1943), who performed using just the name Tamara, was a singer and actress who introduced the song Smoke Gets in Your Eyes [1] in the 1933 Broadway musical Roberta.
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[edit] Stage history
With her dark, exotic looks and throbbing vocal style, Tamara was ideal casting material for European characters in musicals of the 1930s. In Free For All, she was Marishka Tarasov; in Roberta, she was Princess Stephanie of the Russian nobility; and, in Right This Way and Leave It To Me!, she was French. In all, Tamara appeared in seven musicals, from 1927 to 1938.
[edit] Song history
Besides Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and another ballad, The Touch of Your Hand, in Roberta, Tamara introduced three other standards: I Can Dream, Can't I? and I'll Be Seeing You in Right This Way and Get Out Of Town in Leave It To Me!. Ironically, as I'll Be Seeing You became one of the homefront anthems of World War II, sung everywhere and by everyone, Tamara died in a USO plane crash in the very same Europe that her adopted country was trying to liberate just before the war ended.
Her story was partially told in the Jane Froman autobiographical movie, With a Song in My Heart, as both were in the same plane crash.[2]
Tamara is sometimes confused with two other performers of the thirties musical era - the dancers Tamara Geva and Tamara Toumanova.
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes was later re-recorded by The Platters.
