She took her stage name from the first character she played onscreen.
And after dancing and singing with the best of them she was a full fledged MGM star.
She was indeed an image of the girl next door, one who just happened to possess a supple soprano voice worthy of grand opera.
Born Suzanne Lorraine Burse in the Pacific Northwest in 1929, Jane Powell arrived in Hollywood at age 15 after multiple radio appearances, and found herself typecast as a child movie star opposite Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, W.C. Fields and Bonita Granville in 1944’s Song of the Open Road.
This was her movie debut, and since she played a character by the name of Jane Powell, — a child star saddled with an overbearing stage mother — studio solons figured a name change from the ho-hum Suzanne Burce was in order. Thus the teenager emerged with her marquee identity.
Powell’s early career at MGM comprised appealing turns in musicals and light romances, but by the end of the Forties things clicked into a much higher gear.
Powell famously appeared with Astaire in 1951’s memorable musical, Royal Wedding.
Directed by Stanley Donen, the chief characters are drawn from Fred and Adele Astaire, whose longtime brother-sister dance act originally made a splash in New York before migrating to London in he early 1920’s where it made an even bigger splash.
(Fred’s Hollywood career commenced after his professional separation from sister Adele.)
In Royal Wedding, Fred pulls off his usual terpsichorean pyrotechnics including dancing with a hat rack and on the walls and ceiling of his hotel room. What is a bit of a surprise is how well Powell keeps pace with the master.
Her most enduring musical is 1954’s Seven Brides For Seven Brothers, another Donen masterpiece which confirmed Powell’s status as a bona fide STAR.
Dore Shary, the executive who succeeded mogul Louis B. Mayer as MGM head during a five year period beginning in 1951, had his ideas about stardom.
Declared Schary: “This motor is not make-up or clothes or hair. It is not stature, size, kindness, or even talent. Three smaller than lifesize ladies, June Allyson, Debbie Reynolds and Jane Powell, have ‘motors’.”
Motorized or not, Powell belied her girl-next-door image offscreen. She had a busy romantic life, grinding through four husbands in 32 years. Her fifth marriage, to former child actor Dickie Moore in 1988, stuck. (Classic movie fans should note that Moore, who died a year-and-a-half ago, was terrific in 1947’s Out of the Past as the muted “kid”.)
ANSWERS TO YESTERDAY’S MARITAL QUIZ: The three couples pictured in yesterday’s bog from top to bottom are:
Lew Ayres and Ginger Rogers, Betty Grable and Jackie Coogan and Alice Faye and Tony Martin.
It was Ginger’s second of five marriages; and the first for both Grable and Faye. Betty went on to marry bandleader Harry James. Faye’s No. 2 and final was to Phil Harris.
As Joe & Frank already said, JANE POWELL has so far made the trip down the aisle five times, her lengthiest marriage being the last of these when she wed former child star Dickie Moore in 1988. Their harmonious union survived 27 years until Dickie’s demise in 2015. When husband number two, Patrick Nerney, gifted Jane with a pair of diamond ear-rings, her life-long fear of needles placed her in a dilemma. She overcame it by informing her doctor that he could only deliver her baby if he also pierced her ears whilst she was anaesthetised. He agreed and she exited the delivery room with one brand new baby and two freshly pierced ears!
With the decline in the public’s interest in movie musicals towards the end of the fifties, Jane wisely left MGM, before they could fire her, and headed for the East Coast where she resuscitated her career, starring on the musical stage with Howard Keel. She would, of course, have preferred to stay in pictures but, as she openly conceded: ‘I didn’t quit movies. They quit me. I’m not very sentimental when it comes to the past’, she added philosophically. ‘I don’t live there and I feel for people who do because it’s never going to be the same as you remember it.’
There’s a good article on Jane Powell and Fred Astaire written by Alan Vanneman on July 31, 2009 for brightlightsfilm.com.
And so to spin-off from JANE POWELL as it were…
One of Hollywood’s most respected directors, Stanley Donen has been responsible for some of the best musicals ever made, including ON THE TOWN, SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN and FUNNY FACE. From a technical standpoint, one of his finest pieces of work appeared in 1951 – ROYAL WEDDING, and its show-stopping song-and-dance sequence in which Fred Astaire appears to defy the laws of physics.
At first, it looks like typical, fleet-footed Astaire; he glides around an opulent yet sparsely-furnished room, clambering on and off furniture to Burton Lane and Alan Jay Lerner’s twinkly You’re All The World To Me. But then, gradually, Astaire begins to perform miracles – dancing all the way up the walls until he’s tapping his toes around the light fixtures.
The entire sequence lasts for more almost four minutes, and if our eyes give us a clue as to how it’s done, the reality is only slightly less magical; the entire film set was constructed inside a metal gimbal, which gradually rotated the stage around to give the impression that Astaire can dance his way around gravity itself.
In order to pull the sequence off perfectly, Astaire had to memorize not only all his dance moves, but also time everything to coincide with the rotation of the room; the slightest error would have left him staggering around, sliding to a heap in one corner of the (which is essentially a tumbling box) or worse, suddenly falling a fairly hefty drop and seriously injuring himself.
This iconic HOLLYWOOD illusion reveals just how stunning Astaire’s technique was. At no point in the sequence do we notice just how hard he’s working to keep balance, keep time, and maintain the stamina required to perform an extended dance routine in a giant tumble drier.
“The way he did it, you never knew he was fighting gravity,” Donen said years later. “The furniture and fixtures were all nailed down, and the room was placed in the middle of a rotating barrel. Cameraman Robert Planck was strapped to a large ironing board, along with his camera, so he could rotate with the room.”
Years later I got to see this same illusion on a much larger scale, when my uncle who was assistant MGM British studio manager, gave me a tour of the 2001: A SPACE ODESSY set…
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 is perhaps the most famous film to use rotating sets. Kubrick was willing to push the frontiers of what was practically possible to create the impression of weightlessness in space, and these sequences were not cheap to film.
The engineering company Vickers Armstrong were hired to build the interior set of the Discovery space craft – a 30-ton metal centrifuge which measured some 38 feet in diameter and 10 feet in width. This hulking mass of steel cost $750,000 – a fair chunk of Kubrick’s estimated $10 million budget – yet the result was one of the most mesmerizing shots in a movie packed full of striking images.
As the Discovery floats serenely through space towards its rendezvous in deep space, Doctor David Bowman (Keir Dullea) is shown running around the hub of the craft, its rotation providing artificial gravity for the travellers inside.
In reality, Dullea’s essentially running on the spot with the entire set rotating beneath his feet, while the camera (mounted on a rig independently from the ‘centrifuge’ set) rolls along after him. While the theory sounds simple, the technical process of putting it all into practice was often incredibly difficult; in a shot where actor Gary Lockwood appears to be serenely sitting and enjoying his space food, he’s actually strapped into a chair and hanging upside down – his food’s glued to the stage in order to prevent it from falling straight past his head.
“All lights and large banks of 16mm projectors also rotated with the set, so that exploding bulbs, loose junk, and reels of film constituted a serious hazard to people nearby,” explained Douglas Trumbull in the article Creating Special Effects For 2001: A Space Odyssey, published in American Cinematographer. “Hard hats had to be worn by everyone involved, and the control area from where the centrifuge was driven, and action directed by closed-circuit television, was netted over with chicken wire and heavy plastic.”
A rotating set was also used for the scenes aboard the Aries shuttle near the start of the film, where a stewardess performs a 180-degree walk around a cylindrical corridor. The technical brilliance of this shot is made all the more breathtaking by Kubrick’s almost geometric cinematography. Like Astaire’s ceiling dance, these and so many other sequences in 2001 are carefully designed to fill us with wonderment… And the ‘trick’ has been repeated in so many other movies that followed.