Jeanette MacDonald

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Jeanette MacDonald in the 1938 film operetta Sweethearts

Jeanette Anna MacDonald (born June 18, 1903 in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania , † January 14, 1965 in Houston , Texas ) was an American actress and singer ( soprano ). Together with Nelson Eddy , she formed a popular canvas pair of the 1930s and early 1940s.

Life

After Jeanette MacDonald had some successes in musicals on Broadway in the 1920s , she received her first film role in 1929 under the direction of Ernst Lubitsch at the side of Maurice Chevalier in the early sound film Love Parade . In the following years she played in several musicals, such as Monte Carlo and One Hour with Dir , again directed by Lubitsch, but with the renewed decline of the genre after 1932, her career also seemed to be running out. She went to Paris, where she made some very successful appearances in exclusive nightclubs and revue houses and soon became the Toast of Paris .

Thanks to the new popularity, her agent managed to sign a contract with MGM for her . Her first film was a trivial musical titled The Cat and The Fiddle , which had only moderate box office success. After Grace Moore quit production after some quarrels, Irving Thalberg finally gave MacDonald the lead role in the lavish film adaptation of The Merry Widow in 1934 . Directed by Ernst Lubitsch, the male lead went to Maurice Chevalier. MacDonald's breakthrough to star came in the following year as partner of baritone Nelson Eddy in an operetta Tolle Marietta . The film was such a hit that the two became a screen couple. In the years that followed, you shot several very opulently produced operettas, including the 1936 film Rose-Marie . She had her first solo success with San Francisco on the side of Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy . The film portrayed the dramatic earthquake of 1906 and MacDonald sang the famous movie song that became the city's official anthem.

She married her colleague Gene Raymond in 1937 , with whom she made the film Smilin Through four years later . She and her husband have always rejected rumors of an affair with her film partner Nelson Eddy, which were also nurtured by her sister Blossom. At the beginning of the 1940s her career came to an end. She made two more films after the war, including one with Lassie as a partner. After 1949 she retired to the concert stage, where she performed very successfully until her death. In 1958 she released an album with Nelson Eddy with her best songs. She had several sisters who were also actresses, including Blossom Rock .

MacDonald wasn't very popular with her peers, and the nickname Iron Butterfly was still one of the most polite terms to use. The MacDonald / Eddy films are now well-loved examples of what is called camp in American culture . In German, the term can only be given imprecisely with trivial or kitsch .

Filmography

Films with Nelson Eddy are marked with an asterisk *.

literature

  • Edward Baron Turk: Hollywood Diva, A Biography of Jeanette MacDonald , Berkeley and Los Angeles, California, 2000
  • Rich, Sharon, Sweethearts: The Timeless Love Affair Onscreen and Off Between Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy , Bell Harbor Press, 2001

Web links

Commons : Jeanette MacDonald  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME MacDonald, Jeanette
ALTERNATIVE NAMES MacDonald, Jeanette Anna (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American actress and singer (soprano)
DATE OF BIRTH June 18, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Philadelphia , Pennsylvania
DATE OF DEATH January 14, 1965
Place of death Houston , Texas