Jane Powell, Indispensable particular person of ‘Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,’ Dies at 92

Jane Powell, the comely and refined singing well-known particular person of such ebullient Hollywood musicals as A Date With Judy, Royal Marriage ceremony and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, died Thursday. She used to be 92.

Powell, who projected a image of the innocent girl subsequent door all the way through her movie occupation, which began as a teen, died of pure causes at her dwelling in Wilton, Connecticut, film critic and longtime fair correct friend Susan Granger told The Hollywood Reporter.

With her soprano operatic scream, Powell also used to be a recording well-known particular person and a current stage performer, playing in avenue productions of such musicals as The Sound of Music, Oklahoma!, My Vivid Lady and Carousel, and she reteamed with her Seven Brides co-well-known particular person Howard Keel in South Pacific and I Cease! I Cease!

Powell used to be married five occasions. Her first husband used to be Geary Steffen, the ice-skating partner of Norwegian Olympic champion Sonja Henie; her remaining used to be worn miniature one well-known particular person Dickie Moore, who died in September 2015.

An full of life hazel-eyed beauty, Moore is most famously known for playing boarding-dwelling cook Milly, who falls in luxuriate in with frontier farmer Adam (Keel) and fashions out to educate his six extreme brothers a component or two about manners, in Stanley Donan’s Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), one of the popular MGM motion photographs of all time.

In the rollicking CinemaScope classic, which used to be in step with Stephen Vincent Benet’s 1937 short myth The Sobbin’ Girls, Powell hoofs it up in the Oregon Territory of the 1850s and performs “Dazzling, Dazzling Day” in an glaring studio-space meadow, a spotlight of the film.

MGM had effect most of its cash stupid one other musical that 300 and sixty five days, Brigadoon, starring Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse. But the summer season sleeper Seven Brides, with impeccable contributions from choreographer Michael Kidd and lyricist Johnny Mercer, went on to deplorable $6 million and herald five Oscar nominations, including one for perfect image (it lost to On the Waterfront).

Earlier, Powell had stepped in for June Allyson (who used to be pregnant) and then Judy Garland (who used to be fired after missing a rehearsal) to play the wise-cracking sister of Fred Astaire’s character in Donan’s first solo directing effort, the musical romance Royal Marriage ceremony (1951).

One other box effect of enterprise hit, Royal Marriage ceremony marked the important time that Powell had been solid as an grownup character, and her Ellen Bowen winds up marrying Peter Lawford’s Lord John Brindale.

She and Astaire even indulge in rather about a enjoyable with the faucet-dancing tune and dance number with the breathless title, “How Could perhaps You Imagine Me After I Stated I Esteem You When You Know I’ve Been a Liar All My Life?”

Powell’s MGM musical résumé also included Two Weeks With Esteem (1950), Athena (1954) — she used to be the oldest of six sisters in her Seven Brides be aware-up — and Hit the Deck (1955), all three co-starring Debbie Reynolds.

In 1973, she made her Broadway debut when she changed Reynolds in a revival of Irene, then returned to the stage in 2004 for Stephen Sondheim’s Jump, playing a section that Sondheim had written upright for her.

Extra today, Powell done the widowed mother of Alan Thicke’s dwelling-run psychiatrist character on the 1985-92 ABC sitcom Rising Anguish and had stints on the sunlight hours cleaning soap operas As the World Turns and Loving.

She used to be born Suzanne Lorraine Burce on April 1, 1929, in Portland, Oregon. Her other folks hoped she would become one other Shirley Temple and, buoyed by singing, dancing and performing lessons (no longer to claim a everlasting to give her curls upright like Temple), she garnered nightclub jobs at some level of World War II and got her opt up weekly radio conceal.

After the family moved to Los Angeles, she sang an aria to rob a abilities contest on Janet Gaynor’s Stars Over Hollywood radio program. MGM pros took be aware and signed her to a contract at $225 every week, placing her in the Miniature Crimson Schoolhouse on the lot. She used to be the most effective one in her class, she once recalled.

“We had other advantages, clearly. It used to be absorbing,” she told the Chicago Tribune in 2011. “You bought to fulfill other folks you’d never in any other case gain to fulfill. But there’s one thing formative years leave out if they don’t indulge in the conventional progression from kindergarten to grade college to high college, all of that. There had been no sleepovers, no girls’ nights. I didn’t know anyone. It used to be a lonely existence, truly.”

At age 15, she obtained her first movie credit when she used to be loaned to United Artists for Music of the Launch Avenue (1944), playing a rich, miniature one movie well-known particular person that needs to loiter around with widespread children. One of her numbers, “Too Great in Esteem,” got an Oscar nom for perfect fashioned tune.

Her character in the movie used to be named Jane Powell, and she used to be told to use that as her stage title.

Working on the total in lavish Technicolor with producer Joe Pasternak and Cuban bandleader Xavier Cugat, Powell then entranced audiences in such musicals as Delightfully Harmful (1945), George Sidney’s Vacation in Mexico (1946) — she made the cowl of Life magazine after that film — Three Valorous Daughters (1948), A Date With Judy (1948), Nancy Goes to Rio (1950) and, opposite Ricardo Montalban, Two Weeks in Esteem.

(A Date With Judy tidbit: The tune from one of her songs in that film, “It’s a Most Queer Day,” can also simply additionally be heard when Cary Grant walks into the Plaza resort foyer near the starting of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.)

In 1949, Powell sang at Harry S. Truman’s Inauguration Ball. Also around this time, she launched a recording occupation with the Columbia and MGM labels.

For Warner Bros., she starred in the musicals Rich, Young and Beautiful (1951) with Vic Damone, Itsy-bitsy Town Lady (1953) with Ann Miller and Three Sailors and a Lady (1953) with Gordon MacRae, Gene Nelson (with whom she would soon indulge in an affair) and Merv Griffin.

After making Hit the Deck, Powell requested to be released from her MGM contract and left the studio at age 26 in November 1955. The generation of the huge studio musical used to be coming to an finish.

Powell stood out in RKO’s The Lady Most Most likely (1958), directed by Mitchell Leisen and choreographed by Gower Champion, and — in her first non-musical feature — done the promiscuous adopted daughter of an growing outdated actress (Hedy Lamarr) combating over the identical man in the Universal melodrama The Feminine Animal (1958).

Powell then grew to become a widespread on tv, appearing on such range staples as The Perry Como Expose, The Andy Williams Expose, The Ed Sullivan Expose and The Hollywood Palace. She starred in a are residing 1959 remake of Meet Me in St. Louis for NBC, fronted her opt up 1961 special and used to be a panelist and thriller guest on the game conceal What’s My Line?

Her remaining movie look got right here in Insist This (1999), all the way through which she done an arts patron, and she used to be gorgeous as a girl with dementia on a 2002 episode of Law & Expose: Particular Victims Unit.

She wrote a 1988 autobiography, The Lady Subsequent Door and How She Grew, and done in a one-girl conceal by that title.

Her marriage ceremony to Steffen in November 1949 in Beverly Hills used to be a Hollywood-style extravaganza that featured 500 visitors. Her Date With Judy co-well-known particular person Elizabeth Taylor used to be one of her bridesmaids; she returned the prefer at Taylor’s first marriage ceremony, to Conrad Hilton.

She and Moore met in 1981 when he used to be researching his e book about miniature one actors, Twinkle, Twinkle, Miniature Indispensable particular person (But Don’t Have Intercourse or Safe the Automobile), and they married in 1988.

Survivors encompass her children, Geary, Suzanne and Lindsay, and grandchildren, Skye and Tia.

Duane Byrge contributed to this file.