Gloria Jean - Career

Career

Gloria Jean was born Gloria Jean Schoonover in Buffalo, New York. Her family moved to Scranton, Pennsylvania, where she sang on radio with Paul Whiteman's band. She was being trained as a coloratura soprano, when her voice teacher, Leah Russel, took her to an audition held by Universal Pictures movie producer Joe Pasternak in 1938. Pasternak had guided Deanna Durbin to stardom, and with Durbin now advancing to ingenue roles, Pasternak wanted a younger singer to make the same kind of musicals. Up against hundreds of other girls, Gloria Jean won the audition.

Under contract to Universal, she was given the leading role in the 1939 feature The Under-Pup, and became instantly popular with moviegoers. Universal's publicity department initially claimed the singer was 11 years old instead of 13; her actual age was not well known until recently. For her next two vehicles, she co-starred with Bing Crosby in If I Had My Way and starred in the well-received A Little Bit of Heaven (which reunited her with many from the Under-Pup cast). Her best-known picture is her fourth, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, in which she co-starred with W. C. Fields.

Universal recognized the need for musical entertainment during wartime, and Gloria Jean appeared in a series of musicals during those years. She became one of Universal's most prolific performers; during the war years she made 14 feature films. Most were "hepcat" musicals, which were geared to the teenage crowd of that day, and Universal often used them to introduce new talent, including Donald O'Connor, Peggy Ryan, Mel Tormé, and Marshall Thompson.

Gloria Jean made a successful transition to young-adult roles. Her dramatic tour de force, as a blind girl being menaced by an escaped killer, was filmed as one of four vignettes for Julien Duvivier's Flesh and Fantasy. Her performance won raves at the film's advance preview, and her segment was the best-received of the four. However, Universal removed the half-hour sequence and shelved it until 1944, when it was expanded into a feature-length melodrama, Destiny. She co-starred with Olsen and Johnson in the big-budget Ghost Catchers, and in her last two Universal features, released in 1945, she was teamed with singer-actor Kirby Grant.

When Gloria Jean's Universal contract lapsed, she was persuaded by her agent to not renew it, but instead to make personal appearances across America. The successful tour prompted a new tour of Europe. In England, her rendition of "The Lord's Prayer" (and the lyric "forgive us our debts") was taken by some critics as a pointed comment about America's lend-lease policy. Thus the European tour ended abruptly and Gloria Jean returned to Hollywood.

She resumed her movie career as a freelance performer in United Artists, Columbia Pictures, and Allied Artists productions, the best-known being Copacabana with Groucho Marx. Some stage and television work followed in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as four feature films. Wonder Valley (1953), produced on location in Arkansas, was Gloria Jean's first color film and is not known to survive. Air Strike (1955), a minor military drama, was followed by the lightweight comedy The Madcaps (filmed in 1959, re-released 1964). Her final movie was The Ladies Man (1961) with Jerry Lewis, but her scenes were cut from the final print and she is barely noticeable among the extras.