Saturdays with the Stars: Debbie Reynolds

Each month of 2024 we are taking a look at an actress who bore the title "America's Sweetheart" during the peak of her film fame, and what she did with the title (including when it was passed on to the next Hollywood princess).  Last month, we discussed Doris Day, the biggest box office draw in America whose squeaky clean persona kept her from gaining the critical acclaim many of her peers received (and a rough personal life felt at-odds with how America saw her).  This month, we're talking about another actress of Day's era, one who starred in a series of musicals, many of them with shiny personas.  But unlike Day, this star had to endure most of her tabloid scandals on the front-page in real time, enduring one of the most famous love triangles in Hollywood history, and this eventually led to a saucier off-screen persona that came out past the peak of her fame as "America's Sweetheart."  This month's star is Debbie Reynolds.

Born a carpenter's daughter in El Paso, Texas, Reynolds biggest influences as a child were a domineering mother and a strict life built around her Nazarene faith.  At the age of 16, her family moved to Burbank, California, where she won a beauty contest, and with it, she got a studio contract from Warner Brothers, where Jack Warner himself gave her the stage name of "Debbie" (her birth name was Mary Frances).  Her contract at Warner didn't work out (they weren't making musicals like they had a decade earlier), so she got moved to MGM, where she starred in Two Weeks with Love and scored the radio hit "Aba Daba Honeymoon," the first soundtrack to result in a gold record.  From there, she made the signature role of her career, as Kathy Selden in the cinematic classic Singin' in the Rain.

Reynolds would then enjoy about a decade's worth of success as a leading actress, and eventually a lucrative television contract that she would give up on principle (Reynolds was long a champion of a number of causes, particularly film preservation).  But it was in 1959 that Reynolds both became America's Sweetheart and girl-next-door, and also became the third leg of a massive scandal when her husband (singer Eddie Fisher) had an affair with the recently widowed Elizabeth Taylor, and left Reynolds (and their two children, including daughter Carrie) alone as he married Taylor.  This resulted in mountains of goodwill for Reynolds, but never the sort of critical acclaim that Taylor received in its wake (the latter actress would go on to win two Oscars...Reynolds, only a nomination).  But Reynolds career and the decades of television, stage work, & comebacks that came in the years that followed have shaped her career in a decidedly different way than Doris Day, whom she was similar to during her peak fame, and I want to investigate why, through the movies she made while and after she was America's Sweetheart.