Saturdays with the Stars: Mitzi Gaynor

Each month of 2019 we have been looking at the careers of leading ladies of Classical Hollywood who were never nominated for an Academy Award as part of our "Saturdays with the Stars" series.  Last month, our focus was on Ida Lupino, a contract player for Warner Brothers who became the most important female film director of the 1950's.  This month, we encounter our final star of this year's Saturdays with the Stars season; in January, we'll restart with a new theme and a new slate of actors for 2020, but before we go we have one last Oscar-less actress (though a living one, so Governor's Awards, take note), a singer-dancer whose career flourished throughout the 1950's to just as quickly end with the studio system...though she'd continue on for decades on stage and television.  Our final star of 2019 is Mitzi Gaynor.

Born Francesca Marlene de Czanyi von Gerber (clearly an easy call by Fox to eventually change her name) in Chicago to a dancer and musician, Gaynor first found her artistic spirit through dance, becoming a trained ballerina, which eventually brought her to Los Angeles.  At the age of just 17, she was signed to a career at Fox, and made her screen debut in 1950's My Blue Heaven, where she starred alongside another singing-and-dancing legend, Betty Grable, whose career was starting to wane at the time.  She graduated to leading woman status in relatively quick order, and throughout her career at Fox (and then eventually Paramount & MGM), appeared regularly in movies in the 1950's

Like Ruth Roman, whom we profiled earlier this series, Gaynor probably wouldn't be on a list like this were it not for the most famous role in her career, Nellie Forbush in South Pacific.  The Rodgers & Hammerstein masterpiece's leading role had been originally played by Mary Martin on Broadway, but like The Sound of Music would soon do, the studio would decline Martin for her original role in favor of a more proven commodity in Hollywood.  The film was a smash hit, and remains today the most important film of Gaynor's career.  She was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for the performance, but just missed at the Oscars, and would never be cited by the Academy, though a 1967 performance of "Georgy Girl" by the actress would result in one of the telecast's longest standing ovations.

Gaynor in interviews has been more dismissive of her film career (other than South Pacific), though her recent foray into Twitter has changed that, and thankfully she's been providing anecdotes about her film roles (and has stated multiple times she's working on a memoir, which would prove surely insightful as possibly the last living person to have worked with Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, AND Marilyn Monroe onscreen).  She retired from film in 1963, but continued to entertain for decades, being on the same Ed Sullivan Show as The Beatles, and becoming a staple in Las Vegas.  This month, though, we'll focus on her cinematic output to see Gaynor's lasting work in film, and I will be given the treat of getting to see South Pacific for the very first time.