Operatic Film Star

MGM, via Photofest - Kathryn Grayson in “Kiss Me Kate.”

February 19, 2010
Kathryn Grayson, Operatic Film Star, Dies at 88
By ANITA GATES

Kathryn Grayson, the petite singer and actress whose operatic voice and campus-sweetheart beauty embodied the glamour of Hollywood movie musicals in the 1940s and ’50s, died Wednesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 88. Her death was confirmed by her secretary of 31 years, Sally Sherman.

Ms. Grayson, a coloratura soprano, was best known for three film roles: the movie hopeful who attracts the attentions of two sailors (Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra) on shore leave in Hollywood in “Anchors Aweigh” (1945); Magnolia Hawks, the captain’s innocent daughter, who falls for the handsome gambler Gaylord Ravenal (Howard Keel), in the Technicolor remake of “Show Boat” (1951); and the sophisticated, comically shrewish actress starring in a Shakespearean musical with her ex-husband (Mr. Keel again) in “Kiss Me Kate” (1953), Hollywood’s adaptation of the Broadway hit.

MGM - Ms. Grayson flanked by Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly in “Anchors Aweigh.”

Her screen duets with Mr. Keel included “Make Believe” and “You Are Love” from “Show Boat,” “So in Love” from “Kiss Me Kate” and “Lovely to Look At” from the film of the same name. Along with Sinatra, she also introduced movie audiences to “Time After Time.”

After her movie career, during which she often played opera stars, she went on to perform in actual operas, primarily in summer theaters. She also toured the country in the 1980s and ’90s with a one-woman stage show; in the late ’90s, she toured with an old movie co-star, Van Johnson.

In 1996, looking back at her experiences in Hollywood, Ms. Grayson shared her thoughts about the death of American movie musicals with The New York Times. “The audience did not change,” she said. “The studios changed. They wanted to make cheap movies and grab the money and run.”

Zelma Kathryn Elisabeth Hedrick was born on Feb. 9, 1922, in Winston-Salem, N.C., the third child of Charles and Lillian Hedrick. The family moved to Kirkwood, Mo., near St. Louis, where she studied voice and aspired to an opera career. Her parents moved to California, and when she was 15 she was signed by Red Seal, the classical arm of RCA Victor Records. Seen and heard by MGM executives, she was persuaded to abandon her opera ambitions and do her singing in the movies instead.

She made her film debut in the title role in “Andy Hardy’s Private Secretary” (1941), opposite Mickey Rooney. This, the seventh full-length feature in the series about wholesome prewar teenagers, gave the 19-year-old Ms. Grayson the opportunity to sing Johann Strauss’s “Voices of Spring” and the mad-scene aria from Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” onscreen.

Over the next 15 years she made 20 films, including “That Midnight Kiss” (1949) and “The Toast of New Orleans” (1950), both with the tenor Mario Lanza; “So This Is Love” (1953), a biography of the opera star Grace Moore; “It Happened in Brooklyn” (1947), a romantic musical in which Sinatra starred as a soldier home from the war; and her disappointing swan song, “The Vagabond King” (1956), a costume musical set in 15th-century France.

She never made it to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, but she did appear on Broadway, replacing Julie Andrews as Guenevere in “Camelot” in 1962. The following year she began a national tour of the show but dropped out because of what was described as nervous exhaustion.

Ms. Grayson also acted in a handful of television series, beginning in the 1950s. She was nominated for a 1956 Emmy Award for her dramatic role in an episode of “General Electric Theater.” Her final screen appearance was in 1989 on the CBS detective series “Murder, She Wrote,” one of three she made on that show as a small-town gossip.

In 1941, when Ms. Grayson was 19, she eloped with John Shelton, an actor and singer, whom she divorced in 1946. She and the radio singer Johnnie Johnston were married from 1947 to 1951 and had a daughter, Patricia Towers, who survives her, along with two grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

Ms. Grayson never seemed to consider her film career life-defining, perhaps because it was something of an accident. “After seeing my screen test, I wanted desperately to get out of my contract,” she told Hedda Hopper in a 1951 interview for The Los Angeles Times. However, she added, she had grown to enjoy movie acting: “If you don’t get fun out of a particular type of work, why do it?”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 20, 2010
An obituary on Friday about the actress and singer Kathryn Grayson referred incorrectly to the opera singer Grace Moore, whom Ms. Grayson portrayed in the 1953 film “So This Is Love.” Ms. Moore was not paralyzed. The obituary also erroneously attributed a distinction to Ms. Grayson’s on-screen performance of the song “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” Irene Dunne sang it in the 1935 film “Roberta,” 17 years before Ms. Grayson sang it in “Lovely to Look At”; Ms. Grayson did not “introduce movie audiences” to the song.

The London Independent obituary has this curious paragraph: With her heart-shaped face, turned-up nose and ample bust, she portrayed a more mature persona than the young Durbin, and in 1946 Pasternak signed another soprano, Jane Powell, but the two were not rivals – while Powell's films had great appeal for teenagers and paired her romantically with adolescent males, Grayson's leading men included Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Mario Lanza and Howard Keel. Keel, a frequent co-star, described her as "the most beautiful woman in the history of movies"

The Telegraph obit has this opening paragraph: Possessed in youth of an hour-glass figure and a chest appropriate to a much bigger voice, she had a pert expression, bee-stung lips and a retroussé nose that her studio, if not always her public, thought would be irresistible. She appeared in 20 films, all but three for MGM – but only one, the 1952 remake of Show Boat, was a big hit.