Kathryn Grayson was the star of nearly a score of Hollywood musicals in the 1940s and 1950s, appearing opposite Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Mario Lanza and Howard Keel. Small and busty, with a pretty, heart-shaped face, she brought to her roles a sweet, coloratura soprano voice, often likened to that of a thrush.
Despite playing leads in such lavish productions as Show Boat and Kiss Me Kate, however, her screen career lasted little more than a decade. In part she was the victim of changing times and tastes, as the once unassailable MGM musical ran its course. But she was, perhaps, not a strong or versatile enough actress to adapt to the new climate.
She was born Zelma Kathryn Elizabeth Hedrick in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 1922. Her father was a building contractor and real estate agent, and the family moved regularly during her childhood. As a 12-year-old in St Louis, Missouri, she started having voice lessons and studied under Frances Marshall, of the Chicago Civic Opera.
The family moved on, to Texas and then to California, where she was signed at 15 by RCA Redseal Records. At this point she was thinking of a career in opera. This was put aside, however, in 1939 when MGM, looking for a new star soprano after the defection of Deanna Durbin to Universal, gave her a contract without even a screen test.
For more than a year she had to cool her heels as MGM put her through singing and acting lessons, but she was still in her teens when she made her screen debut as Mickey Rooney’s secretary/girlfriend in Andy Hardy’s Private Secretary (1941). She sang Johann Strauss’s Voices of Spring. The British critic A. E. Wilson acclaimed “a real discovery” and predicted that she would rival Durbin.
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Her relationship with MGM was never easy. She wanted the freedom to combine screen roles with opera and concert appearances. The studio was determined to limit her freedom while reluctant for a time to offer her more than supporting parts. She was with Abbot and Costello in a remake of the musical, Rio Rita, before finally getting a vehicle tailored for her, Seven Sweethearts (1942).
She and Gene Kelly formed the framing device for turns from the MGM contract stars in Thousands Cheer, while in Anchors Aweigh she was with Kelly and Frank Sinatra, who played sailors on leave in Los Angeles. She was with Sinatra, again, and Jimmy Durante, in It Happened in Brooklyn but her final teaming with Sinatra, on The Kissing Bandit (1948), was a disaster that both of them tried to forget.
In 1949 MGM decided to launch its latest singing discovery, Mario Lanza, in That Midnight Kiss, followed by The Toast of New Orleans. Grayson co-starred in both, but with Lanza’s heavy drinking and coarse behaviour they were not happy assignments. Nor did they ring bells at the box office until Lanza suddenly became popular and the films were hurriedly reissued.
There followed Grayson’s most fruitful period as a Hollywood leading lady. In 1951 MGM decided on a new version of the Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein Show Boat, previously filmed in 1936, and teamed Grayson as Magnolia, the demure heroine, with Howard Keel as the gambler, Ravenal. The partnership with Keel gelled and was repeated in Lovely to Look At.
Grayson, however, was still unhappy with what MGM was offering and said so. The studio responded by loaning her out to Warner Brothers, where she made a third screen version of the operetta, The Desert Song, with Gordon Macrae, and played the opera singer Grace Moore in the biopic So This is Love.
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Back at MGM she had arguably her most effective screen role, even though she was to an extent cast against type as the tantrum-prone actress in Kiss Me Kate (1953), Cole Porter’s musical take on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew.
Keel was her sparring partner. Although MGM was happy enough with the result to announce further musicals for Grayson, including Camille and Brigadoon, nothing happened and Kiss Me Kate was her last work for the studio.
She made only one more film, a revival of Rudolf Friml’s The Vagabond King (1956) with which Paramount hoped to launch a new singing star, Oreste. The picture flopped, Oreste returned to Covent Garden where he was principal tenor, and for Grayson, still in her thirties, it was the end of her film career.
“They don’t make my sort of musical in Hollywood any more,” she reflected a few years later and that, essentially, was the truth.
She turned to the stage, cabaret and television. In 1958 she appeared in London at the Prince of Wales Theatre and two years later made her first appearance on British television. In 1960 she made her operatic debut in Madame Butterfly and later played in La traviata and La bohème.
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She toured in The Merry Widow and Naughty Marietta and in 1962 took over from Julie Andrews as Queen Guinevere in the Broadway production of Camelot, followed by a 16-month national tour.
She appeared in stage productions of her film successes, Show Boat and Kiss Me Kate, and toured with Keel in Man of La Mancha. She and Keel also performed together in cabaret in Las Vegas.
She later turned to straight acting, appearing in three episodes of the TV series, Murder She Wrote, and, in 1987, an American production of Michael Frayn’s farce Noises Off. She launched a one-woman show, An Evening with Kathryn Grayson, which she presented for ten years. In the 1990s she joined another former MGM star, Van Johnson, for two stage presentations, Love Letters and Red Sox and Roses. She also gave masterclasses and voice lessons.
She had two short-lived marriages, to the actor John Shelton (1940-46) and the actor and singer, Johnny Johnston (1947-51). During the 1950s she had an affair with Howard Hughes, the reclusive millionaire, and they were reported to be briefly engaged. By her second husband she had a daughter, who survives her.
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Kathryn Grayson, actress and singer, was born on February 9, 1922. She died on February 17, 2010, aged 88