jane powell

Born April 1, 1929, Suzanne Lorraine Burce – real name of Jane Powell – got her start at the age of five as a singing prodigy on the radio in Portland, Oregon. During World War II, she adopted the nickname Oregon Victory Girly to tour the state on a musical tour. As a teenager, she moved to Los Angeles, where she landed a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios (MGM). Because of her magnificent voice, which surprised viewers due to her small stature, she was cast in tender roles for musicals.

She made her feature film debut in Song of the Open Road , where she played a singer fed up with her mother managing her career, limiting her, so she runs away and joins a youth group. Her character was called  Jane Powell , so she decided to adopt that artistic name. She was followed by titles like Festival in Mexico ,  Asi son ellas , Adorable coqueta ,  Athena  and Nancy goes to Rio .  

When she wasn’t shooting movies,  Jane Powell would tour theaters across the country for a vaudeville show, which she later admitted she loathed. She worked under one of the greats of the genre,  Stanley Donen , in Royal Weddings , where she shared the screen with the greatest star of the dance,  Fred Astaire , who interpreted one of his best known numbers, in which he danced in the the ceiling. The same filmmaker recruited her for the best-known title of the interpreter,  Seven Brides for Seven Brothers , where she played Milly, a newlywed determined that the six brothers of her newly released husband – played by Howard Keel– find a woman and get married, a task complicated by their rude manners. Nominated for an Oscar in five categories, including best film, the film was finally awarded a statuette for best soundtrack ( Adolph Deutsch ).

In 1949, Jane Powell married Gearhardt Anthony Steffen, figure skater turned insurance broker. After the birth of her two offspring, the couple decided to divorce. Later, she joined Patrick W. Nerney, an automobile executive nine years her senior, with whom she had another daughter. In her later years she was paired with  Dickie Moore , another former child prodigy.

jane Powell he wrapped up the 1950s with titles like  Deep in My Heart ,  Hit the Deck ,  Choosing a Boyfriend ,  The Female Animal  , and  Enchanted Island. At the end of his contract with MGM, he did not stop railing against the company. “People are fascinated by the so-called golden age of musicals, but it wasn’t that great,” she said in an interview. “Everything was flawed. Those movies don’t reflect reality. I was at MGM for eleven years and no one would let me play anything but teenagers. I was twenty-five and had kids of my own and it was getting ridiculous. The advertising was foam. Everything I He said he was monitored. With me, they didn’t have to worry. I never had anything to say anyway. It was hard work, I had no friends, no social interaction with people my age, and the isolation was hard. But I had to keep my family, so I did what they told me and I had no choice.

After ending her relations with the studio, offers were hardly raining on her, so she took refuge in the theater, in numerous musicals. She came to meet Howard Keel , in a stage production of  Seven Brides for Seven Brothers , which was enormously successful. In the 1980s, she lavished herself on television, with supporting roles in Holidays at Sea and Murder, She Wrote . In the popular Growing Trouble , she brought Grandma to life. She retired in 2002, following an appearance on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit . After Moore’s death in 2015,  Jane Powell he sold his Manhattan apartment and moved permanently to his second home in Wilton, Connecticut.