DEBBIE REYNOLDS AND CARLETON CARPENTER
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Debbie Reynolds
Mary Frances "Debbie" Reynolds (April 1, 1932 – December 28, 2016) was an American actress, singer, and businesswoman. Her career spanned almost 70 years. She was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Most Promising Newcomer for her portrayal of Helen Kane in the 1950 film Three Little Words. Her breakout role was her first leading role, as Kathy Selden in Singin' in the Rain (1952). Her other successes include The Affairs of Dobie Gillis (1953), Susan Slept Here (1954), Bundle of Joy (1956 Golden Globe nomination), The Catered Affair (1956 National Board of Review Best Supporting Actress Winner), and Tammy and the Bachelor (1957), in which her performance of the song "Tammy" reached number one on the Billboard music charts. In 1959, she released her first pop music album, titled Debbie.
She starred in Singin' in the Rain (1952), How the West Was Won (1962), and The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964), a biographical film about the famously boisterous Molly Brown. Her performance as Brown earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress. Her other films include The Singing Nun (1966), Divorce American Style (1967), What's the Matter with Helen? (1971), Charlotte's Web (1973), Mother (1996) (Golden Globe nomination), and In & Out (1997). Reynolds was also a cabaret performer. In 1979, she founded the Debbie Reynolds Dance Studio in North Hollywood, which was demolished in 2019 after being sold at auction, despite efforts to turn it into a museum. In 1969, she starred on television in The Debbie Reynolds Show, for which she received a Golden Globe nomination. In 1973, Reynolds starred in a Broadway revival of the musical Irene and was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Lead Actress in a Musical. She was also nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award for her performance in A Gift of Love (1999) and an Emmy Award for playing Grace's mother Bobbi on Will & Grace. At the turn of the millennium, Reynolds reached a new, younger generation with her role as Aggie Cromwell in Disney's Halloweentown series. In 1988, she released her autobiography, titled Debbie: My Life. In 2013, she released a second autobiography, Unsinkable: A Memoir.
Reynolds also had several business ventures, including ownership of a dance studio and a Las Vegas hotel and casino, and she was an avid collector of film memorabilia, beginning with items purchased at the landmark 1970 MGM auction. She served as president of The Thalians, an organization dedicated to mental-
Died December 28, 2016 (aged 84) health causes. Reynolds continued to perform successfully on stage, television, and film into her 80s. In January 2015, Reynolds
received the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award. In 2016, she received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. In the same year, a documentary about her life was released titled Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, which turned out to be her final film appearance; the film premiered on HBO on January 7, 2017.Reynolds died following a hemorrhagic stroke on December 28, 2016, one day after the death of her daughter, fellow actress Carrie Fisher.
Early life
Reynolds was born on April 1, 1932, in El Paso, Texas, to Maxene N. "Minnie" Harman and Raymond Francis "Ray" Reynolds, a carpenter who worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad. She was of Scotch-Irish and English ancestry and was raised in a strict Nazarene church of her domineering mother. She had an older brother, William, who was two years her senior. Reynolds was a Girl Scout, once saying that she wanted to die as the world's oldest living Girl Scout. Reynolds was also a member of The International Order of Job's Daughters.
Her mother took in laundry for income, while they lived in a shack on Magnolia Street in El Paso."We may have been poor," she said in a 1963 interview, "but we always had something to eat, even if Dad had to go out in the desert and shoot jackrabbits." Her family moved to Burbank, California, in 1939. When Reynolds was a 16-year-old student at Burbank High School in 1948, she won the Miss Burbank beauty contest. Soon after, she was offered a contract with Warner Brothers and was given the stage name "Debbie" by studio head Jack L. Warner.
One of her closest high school friends said that she rarely dated during her teenaged years in Burbank. They never found her attractive in school. She was cute, but sort of tomboyish, and her family never had any money to speak of. She never dressed well or drove a car. And, I think, during all the years in school, she was invited to only one dance. Reynolds agreed, saying, "when I started, I didn't even know how to dress. I wore dungarees and a shirt. I had no money, no taste, and no training. Her friend adds: I say this in all sincerity. Debbie can serve as an inspiration to all young American womanhood. She came up the hard way, and she has a realistic sense of values based on faith, love, work, and money. Life has been kind to her because she has been kind to life. She's a young woman with a conscience, which is something rare in Hollywood actresses. She also has a refreshing sense of honesty.
Career
Music career and cabaret
Her recording of the song "Tammy" (1957; from Tammy and the Bachelor), earned her a gold record. It was a number one single on the Billboard pop charts in 1957. In the movie (the first of the Tammy film series), she co-starred with Leslie Nielsen. Reynolds also scored two other top-25 Billboard hits with "A Very Special Love" (number 20 in January 1958) and "Am I That Easy to Forget" (number 25 in March 1960)—a pop-music version of a country- music hit made famous by Carl Belew (in 1959), Skeeter Davis (in 1960), and several years later by singer Engelbert Humperdinck.In 1991, she released an album titled The Best of Debbie Reynolds.For 10 years, she headlined for about three months a year in Las Vegas's Riviera Hotel. She enjoyed live shows, though that type of performing "was extremely strenuous," she said. With a performing schedule of two shows a night, seven nights a week, it's probably the toughest kind of show business, but in my opinion, the most rewarding. I like the feeling of being able to change stage bits and business when I want. You can't do that in motion pictures or TV.
As part of her nightclub act, Reynolds was noted for doing impressions of celebrities such as Eva and Zsa Zsa Gabor, Mae West, Barbra Streisand, Phyllis Diller, and Bette Davis. Her impersonation of Davis was inspired following their co-starring roles in the 1956 film, The Catered Affair.Reynolds had started doing stage impersonations as a teenager; her impersonation of Betty Hutton was performed as a singing number during the Miss Burbank contest in 1948. Reynolds' last album was a Christmas record with Donald O'Connor entitled Chrissy the Christmas Mouse arranged and conducted by Angelo DiPippo. Reynolds was also a French horn player. Gene Kelly, reflecting on Reynolds's sudden fame, recalled, "There were times when Debbie was more interested in playing the French horn somewhere in the San Fernando Valley or attending a Girl Scout meeting....She didn’t realize she was a movie star all of a sudden."
Stage work
With limited film and television opportunities coming her way, Reynolds accepted an opportunity to make her Broadway debut. She starred in the 1973 revival of Irene, a musical first produced 60 years before. When asked why she waited so long to appear in a Broadway play, she explained:
Primarily because I had two children growing up, I could make movies and recordings and plays in nearby Las Vegas and handle a television series without being away from them. Now, they are well on the way to being adults. Also, there was the matter of being offered a show that I felt might be right for me ... I felt that Irene was it and now was the time. Reynolds and her daughter Carrie both made their Broadway debuts in the
play. Per reports, the production broke records for the highest weekly gross of any musical. For that production, she received a Tony nomination. Reynolds also starred in a self-titled Broadway revue, Debbie, in 1976. She toured with Harve Presnell in Annie Get Your Gun, then wrapped up the Broadway run of Woman of the Year in 1983. In the late 1980s, Reynolds repeated her role as Molly Brown in the stage version of The Unsinkable Molly Brown, first opposite Presnell (repeating his original Broadway and movie role) and later with Ron Raines.
Best Foot Forward (1953) (Dallas State Fair) Irene (1973) (Broadway and US national tour)
Debbie (1976) (Broadway)[
Annie Get Your Gun (1977) (San Francisco and Los Angeles)
Woman of the Year (1982) (Broadway) (replacement for Lauren Bacall) The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1989) (US national tour)
Irene (2008) Perth Western Australia
In 2010, she appeared in her own West End show Debbie Reynolds: Alive and Fabulous. Reynolds amassed a large collection of movie memorabilia, beginning with items from the landmark 1970 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer auction, and she displayed them, first in a museum at her Las Vegas hotel and casino during the 1990s and later in a museum close to the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles.
The museum was to relocate to be the centerpiece of the Belle Island Village tourist attraction in the resort city of Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, but the developer went bankrupt.The museum filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June 2009. The most valuable asset of the museum was Reynolds' collection. Todd Fisher, Reynolds' son, announced that his mother was "heartbroken" to have to auction off the collection. It was valued at $10.79 million in the bankruptcy filing. Los Angeles auction firm Profiles in History was given the responsibility of conducting a series of auctions. Among the "more than 3500 costumes, 20,000 photographs, and thousands of movie posters, costume sketches, and props" included in the sales were Charlie Chaplin's bowler hat and Marilyn Monroe's white "subway dress", whose skirt is lifted up by the breeze from a passing subway train in the film The Seven Year Itch (1955). The dress sold for $4.6 million in 2011; the final auction was held in May 2014.
Death and legacy
On December 23, 2016, Reynolds' daughter, actress and writer Carrie Fisher, suffered a medical emergency on a transatlantic flight from London to Los Angeles, and died on December 27, 2016, at the age of 60 at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. The following day, December 28, Reynolds was taken by ambulance to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, after suffering a "severe stroke", according to her son. Later that afternoon, Reynolds was pronounced dead in the hospital; she was 84 years old. On January 9, 2017, her cause of death was determined to be an intracerebral hemorrhage, with hypertension a contributing factor.Todd Fisher later said that Reynolds had been seriously affected by her daughter's death, and that her grief was partially responsible for her stroke, noting that his mother had stated, "I want to be with Carrie", shortly before she died. During an interview for the December 30, 2016 airing of the ABC-TV program 20/20, Todd Fisher elaborated on this, saying that his mother had joined his sister in death because Reynolds "didn't want to leave Carrie and did not want her to be alone". He added, "she didn't die of a broken heart" as some news reports had implied, but rather "just left to be with Carrie”. Reynolds was entombed, while her daughter was cremated. A portion of Carrie Fisher's ashes was laid to rest beside Reynolds' crypt at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Hollywood Hills during a larger joint memorial service held on March 25, while the remainder of Fisher's ashes are held in a giant, novelty Prozac pill.
Carleton Carpenter
Carleton Upham Carpenter Jr. (July 10, 1926 – January 31, 2022) was an American film, television and stage actor, magician, songwriter, and novelist.
Early and personal life
Carpenter was born in Bennington, Vermont, where he attended Bennington High School. He was the son of Carleton Upham Carpenter Sr. He was bisexual. Carpenter lived in Warwick, New York, where he died on January 31, 2022, at the age of 95.
Acting career
Carpenter began his performing career as a magician and an actor on Broadway, beginning with David Merrick's first production, Bright Boy, in 1944, followed by co-starring appearances in Three to Make Ready with Ray Bolger, John Murray Anderson's Almanac, and Hotel Paradiso. He was a featured player on the early television program Campus Hoopla, which was produced by NBC, via WNBT in New York City, and which aindependent producer Louis de Rochemont to play the boyfriend in Lost Boundaries. De Rochemont later cast him again, in The Whistle at Eaton Falls (1951). Carpenter signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1950, where he made eight films in three years: Father of the Bride, Three Little
Words, Summer Stock, Two Weeks With Love, Vengeance Valley, Fearless Fagan (his one-of-two leading roles there), Sky Full of Moon (his other leading role there) and Take the High Ground!. He gained fame when teamed in 1950 with Debbie Reynolds in Three Little Words and Two Weeks with Love. In a guest sequence in Three Little Words, they perform “I Wanna Be Loved by You” as vaudeville players Dan Healy and Helen Kane, with Reynolds dubbed by Kane. In Two Weeks with Love, where they have featured roles, their duet "Aba Daba Honeymoon" was the first soundtrack recording to become a top-of- the-chart gold record, reaching number three on the Billboard chart. After 1953, Carpenter exited films for stage, television, and radio work. Among his television appearances, he played Gilbert Burton, the recipient of $1,000,000 in a 1959 episode of The Millionaire and co-starred with Ann Sothern in the 1954 TV production of Kurt Weill's Lady in the Dark, which he also recorded for RCA Victor Records. In 1963, he played defendant Peter Brent in the Perry Mason episode "The Case of the Lover's Leap". He returned to film in 1959 for Up Periscope for Warner Brothers and, much later, the independent films Cauliflower Cupids (1970) and Some of My Best Friends Are... (1971), as the character "Miss Untouchable".
Carpenter's later stage appearances included Hello, Dolly!, opposite Mary Martin (which toured Vietnam during the war and was filmed as a one-hour NBC-TV special), The Boys in the Band, Dylan, Crazy For You, and the City Center revival of Kander and Ebb's 70, Girls, 70. He was still working occasionally as a stage actor in 2015.
Songwriting
Carpenter composed the songs "Christmas Eve", recorded by Billy Eckstine, "Cabin in the Woods", and "Ev'ry Other Day", which he recorded for MGM Records and sang on screen in The Whistle at Eaton Falls. In 1943 he wrote the words and melody of the song "Can We Forget”. His other song compositions include "I Wouldn't Mind", "A Little Love", and "Come Away". He also wrote the musical Northern Boulevard, produced in New York City by actress Rosetta LeNoire.
Writing
Carpenter wrote material for Debbie Reynolds, Kaye Ballard, Marlene Dietrich, and Hermione Gingold, and also scripts for films and television. Carpenter was a successful mystery novelist in the 1970s and 1980s. His books include Deadhead, Games Murderers Play, Cat Got Your Tongue?, Only Her Hairdresser Knew, Sleight of Deadly Hand, The Peabody Experience, and Stumped. His memoir, The Absolute Joy of Work, was published in 2016. In 2012, he received a lifetime achievement award from the Hollywood film organization Cinecon, which was presented to him in person by his once often co-star Debbie Reynolds.
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