April 1, 2012. Copyright 2012, Graphic News. All rights reserved

Actress Debbie Reynolds, star of Singin' in the Rain, still entertaining at 80
By Susan Shepherd

LONDON, April 1, Graphic News: It's exactly 60 years since the film distributor MGM released what is widely regarded as the greatest of all Hollywood musicals, Singin' in the Rain, starring Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor and a young actress who, for all her beauty queen credentials and prowess as a gymnast, had never danced professionally. Debbie Reynolds, who beat Judy Garland, Leslie Caron and Jane Powell to the role of ingenue Kathy Selden, would famously comment years later that her two toughest jobs were this movie -- and childbirth. Watching the 19-year-old -- born Mary Frances Reynolds in El Paso, Texas -- performing flawlessly on numbers such as Good Mornin', it is sobering to remember that her feet used to bleed after rehearsing such scenes as many as 40 times, with co-star and director Kelly the hardest of taskmasters. The story goes that it was none other than Fred Astaire, hanging around the studio one day, who found Reynolds crying beneath a piano between takes and offered to help her. Reynolds herself later acknowledged that her gruelling treatment was the making of her. And the film, released on March 27, 1952, gave her the breakthrough her career had needed since first signing to Warner Bros. at the age of 16.
 
By the mid-1950s, Reynolds had married singer Eddie Fisher and the good-looking couple enjoyed huge popularity, starring together in the 1956 musical comedy Bundle of Joy. A year later Reynolds topped the charts with her single, Tammy, from the film Tammy and the Bachelor. But her happiness was short-lived when Fisher began an affair with their friend Elizabeth Taylor, newly widowed by the death of her third husband, producer Mike Todd, to whom they had been equally close. "I was the last to find out," Reynolds said in an interview in 2010. "It was a great shock...it left me shattered." With two small children -- Carrie, who would later find fame as Princess Leia in the Star Wars films and Todd, named after Mike -- Reynolds divorced Fisher and quickly remarried a wealthy businessman, Harry Karl, who, over the course of their 13 years together, gambled away all their money. "I happen to have married idiots," Reynolds quips nowadays, including in that statement her third husband, property developer Richard Hamlett, whose disastrous investments saw Reynolds declared bankrupt in 1997 when the hotel and casino business she set up with him in Las Vegas collapsed.
 
Despite some panning from the critics for more recent ventures -- among them the television movie These Old Broads (2001), with Taylor (their friendship was restored on board the QE2 after Taylor married Richard Burton), Joan Collins and Shirley MacLaine -- Reynolds retains a loyal fan base and is still to be found in cabaret, singing and telling anecdotes about her life in showbusiness. Her "Debbie Reynolds: Alive and Fabulous" tour, launched in the UK in 2010 when she was 78, was generally deemed to have lived up to its billing. Younger audiences know her from appearances in the TV sitcom Will and Grace, for which she was awarded an Emmy, while a high-profile auction of costumes she collected over 40 years garnered more headlines last summer when the white "subway" dress worn by Marilyn Monroe achieved $4.6 million, well over double its estimate.
/ENDS