- Helen Kane, Nothing But The Truth, 1929. It’s tough at … the beginning! Jeanette, the future MGM songbird (in a duo with Nelson Eddy for eight hit musicals) tested at Paramount to partner Richard Dix – betting he can tell the truth and nothing but for 24 hours straight. She lost out to Kane – the model for Betty Boop, herself;.
- Anna Neagle, Bitter Sweet, 1933. With Hollywood musicals dying on the clef, The Iron Butterfly signed for two UK ventures – then changed her mind. She went on to make Hollywood’s Bitter Sweet, 1940. The British stage star Noel Coward hated the “nauseating hotchpotch of vulgarity, false values, seedy dialogue, stale sentiment, vile performances, and abominable direction.” And never let Hollywood touch his musicals again.
- Anna Neagle, Runaway Queen (UK: The Queen’s Affair), 1934. The second London film she ran away from. To replace her in both, Herbert Wilcox continued his long association with his future wife.
- Madeleine Carroll, The Prisoner of Zenda, 1937. Back home, she still required a new musical partner. MGM suggested Nelson Eddy and planned a musical version of Anthony Hope’s yarn: songs by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. Instead, The Singing Sweethearts were launched in Naughty Marietta, 1935, shovelling the saccharine over seven more films until 1942.
- Olivia De Havilland, The Adventures of Robin Hood, 1937. At first it was going to be an MGMusical – based on the Reginald de Koven operetta. So obviously, MacDonald and Eddy were set for Marian and Robin.
- Alice Faye, Lillian Russell, 1939. Hoping to cash in on the huge triumph of The Great Ziegfeld, MGM decided upon a Russell biopic with MacDonald as the 1890s operetta and music hall star. Never happened. So Fox was quick to set it up for their musical queen. Alice Faye. However, as New York Times critic Bosley Crowther was quick to point out: “Miss Russell is said to have been a rather poor actress, and Miss Faye – even granting the thinness of her material – does not violate that reputation.”
- Kathryn Grayson, Rio Rita, 1941. What started life as just another Nelson Eddy-Jeannette MacDonald musical suddenly churned into the first of MGM’s three Abbott & Costello farces. Metro canceled their one film per year contract after three flops.
- Irene Manning, The Desert Song, 1942. The brothers Warner loved Sigmund Romberg’s operetta. They first shot it in 1929 – with Carlotta King – and planned a reprise with her in 1935, opposite James Melton, unknown then and now. By ’38, it was set for MacDonald and, naturally, Nelson Eddy The second version finally took off in ’42 with Manning and Dennis Morgan, followed by a third. featuring Gordon MacRae and Kathryn Grayson, in 1952.
- Ilona Massey, Northwest Outpost, 1947. And Republic Pictures wanted just one more… but failed to re-unite Jeannette and Nelson Eddy – America’s Singing Sweethearts – in his musical Western. She was ill and the Hungarian stage, screen and radio star partnered Eddy in his final cinema movie). In 1948, the ex-Ilona Haygmassy was Love Happy, with the (three) Marx brothers.
- Ann Sothern, Nancy Goes to Rio, 1950. Since the eighth and last of their 30s/40s hits, I Married an Angel, in 1941, the singing duo of Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald had to fend off film-makers wanting the publicity of getting them back on-screen “We’ve been asked,” reported Nelson, “to do what might be called B pictures. Rather than do that, we decided to leave it on a high note.”: Which explains how Jeanette and Nelson in MGM’s His Excellency from Brazil in 1949 became Ann Sothern and Barry Sullivan in Nancy Goes to Rio in 1950.
- Kathryn Grayson, Show Boat, 1951. Universal had made the first version of Jerome Kern’s Broadway musical in 1929. By 1936, it was MGM’s turn with the overly operatic duo of MacDonald and Nelson Eddy as Gaylord Ravenal and Magnolia Hawks. No go… By 1946, Metro used its Kern biopic, Till the Clouds Roll By, as a screen test for Kathryn Grayson and Tony Martin (in one segment) and (much better) Lena Horne as Julie LaVerne. Grayson, alone, won the movie. MacDonald was MGM boss LB Mayer’s favourite (until a bust-up over being dubbed in foreign language releases) and he had Metro searching other studios’ properties to buy the best for the Sweethearts… who never made any of them!
- Helen Traubel, Deep In My Heart, 1954. “To all those who love the music of Sigmund Romberg.”Change of Anna Mueller who had a maternal role in the life of Broadway’s Hungarian-born composer (played by José Ferrer). Traubel was most effective when singing ‘Softly’ and ‘Aufwiedersen’ for his dying librettist (Merle Oberon).
- Kathryn Grayson, The Vagabond King, 1956. The Sweethearts had split while awaiting better projects like this one. The 1930 version, Paramount’s first Technicolour talkie, had been MacDonald’s second film.
- Arlene Francis, The Thrill Of It All, 1963. Gone but not forgotten.Not content with winning Doris Day for a third comedy, producer Ross Hunter set out to persuade Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald to make it their first film since the eighth and last of their hits, I Married an Angel, in 1942. But at 61 and 57, they had scant interest in being The Joke – an ageing couple suddenly expecting a baby.
- Peggy Wood, The Sound of Music, 1964. ”The Iron Butterfly” was getting rusty. She had to refuse her first film offer in 16 years due to her increasing bad health. She died, in fact, before the film opened. Peggy Wood substituted as the Mother Abbess in her final movie. “But I can’t handle the songs anymore,” she warned director Robert Wise. She was dubbed for Climb Every Mountain. But then so was Christopher Plummer for Edelweiss.
Birth year: 1903Death year: 1965Other name: Usual occupation: SingerCasting Calls: 15