August 12th
With her bright blue eyes, shining blonde hair and nightingale singing voice, Jane Powell seemed to be living a fairytale life. What teenager doesn’t dream of starring in their very first film at age 14? Jane Powell didn’t. The dream of stardom wasn’t her own, but her parents.
In fact, Powell — born Suzanne Burce in Portland, Oregon —longed to be normal.
But from an early age, before she became Jane Powell, young Suzanne was forced into the spotlight. Like many parents in the 1930s during the Great Depression, Mr. and Mrs. Burce hoped their daughter would be the next Shirley Temple, according to Powell’s 1988 autobiography, “The Girl Next Door and How She Grew.”
“People have asked, ‘How did you get into show business?’ Well, I fulfilled my parents’ dream,” Powell wrote in her autobiography.
By age five, she was singing on the “Stars of Tomorrow” amateur radio program, and at 10 she was taking singing lessons. At 12, she was the Oregon Victory Girl during World War II, traveling around the state, singing and selling war bonds. But her big break came during the summer of 1943. The Burce family took a summer vacation to Hollywood where Powell (still Suzanne) was going to appear on Janet Gaynor’s radio talent show program, “Hollywood Showcase.” She won the program, which led to a seven-year contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
“It was every teenage girl’s wildest dream, and it was really happening to me,” Powell wrote in her autobiography. “I should have been the happiest girl in the world! Well, I wasn’t.”
Powell said she cried while signing the contract, thinking of the good times she would miss out at Grant High School in the fall—dances, basketball games, boyfriends and fun with her friends. Most of all, she didn’t want her friends to think that she was ever bragging or putting on airs.
“I was terrified my old friends in Portland would think I’d become a snob,” Powell wrote. In her letters back home, she rarely mentioned her work or any movie stars she met or was co-starring with. “I was too afraid they’d think I was bragging.”
But she felt an obligation to sign the contract for her parents, because she didn’t want to disappoint them. And her weekly salary was more than what her father made in a month back home in Portland.
Changing her name from Suzanne Burce to Jane Powell happened without much discussion. The young actress was home ironing when she received a telephone call. “Hello, is this Jane Powell?” Informing the caller they had the wrong number she was told, “No I don’t, honey. That’s your new name.”
Powell’s first film wasn’t with her home studio of MGM, but with United Artists. Song of the Open Road (1944) starred Powell in her very first picture, in an art-imitates-life sort of way. Powell plays a child star who longs to be a normal teen and runs away with kids from the American Youth Hostel to escape her busy filmmaking schedule.
“I realize now that I blocked out a lot of the wonderful things that were happening to me because I was afraid of being special…when in fact a whole new world was happening,” she wrote.
It wasn’t until her third film that Powell made a movie at her home studio of MGM—the Technicolor extravaganza, Holiday in Mexico (1946). In the film, Walter Pidgeon plays her father and her sweetheart in the film was Roddy McDowall, who became a lifelong friend.
After that, Powell was in a flurry of films in 1948: A Date with Judy, Luxury Liner, and Three Daring Daughters. In each film, Powell played bright-eyed teenagers. In most of these teenage roles, Powell was just being herself. Directors and screenwriters wanted the teenage characters to be natural, so she would include comments, slang or exclamations that she would speak in real life.
But as Powell got older, she longed to grow up onscreen as well. She was often frustrated when co-stars, like her friend Elizabeth Taylor in A Date with Judy, were allowed to mature on-screen. In A Date with Judy, Taylor wore tight sweaters, eyeshadow and is romanced by Robert Stack, while Powell still looked like a little girl. Even in the Variety review the juxtaposition between the two is apparent: “Talented young Jane Powell …” and “Elizabeth Taylor is a breathtaking beauty…”
Powell married Geary Steffen in 1949 at age 20 (though she writes, “a very young twenty”) and was still cast in young roles, including Nancy Goes to Rio (1950), where she “played the usual role, with a risqué plot twist.” In love with an older man (played by Barry Sullivan), everyone mistakenly thinks that Powell is pregnant. In Two Weeks with Love (1950) — Powell’s personal favorite film — she gets a grownup romance with Ricardo Montalban, but plays a naïve 17-year-old. In both Nancy Goes to Rio and Two Weeks with Love, Powell co-starred with matinee idol turned character actor, Louis Calhern, who she said was one of her favorite movie dads and granddads. Even when she was pregnant with her first child and frequently ill on set, Powell still played someone’s daughter in Rich, Young and Pretty (1951).
All of Powell’s films are delightful, vibrant, colorful and filled with beautiful music, but they didn’t allow her to grow as a performer or as an adult. “I kept the simplicity for much too long. For 35 or 40 years, I was a sweet young thing. ‘Stay as sweet as you are,’ they said, ‘and never change,’” Powell wrote.
Finally, Powell was allowed to mature on screen in her first adult role, Royal Wedding (1951). Replacing June Allyson, who was pregnant, and Judy Garland, who was ill, Powell played the sister of Fred Astaire. The two have an engagement to dance in London surrounding the festivities of the wedding of Prince Phillip and Princess Elizabeth. After the success of Royal Wedding, Powell was disappointed to play yet another “sweet” character in Small Town Girl (1953), but she made friends with one of her co-stars, Ann Miller.
While her on-screen image was typecast as sweet, headlines about Powell in 1953 and 1954 were not so squeaky clean. While filming Three Sailors and a Girl (1953), her on-screen beau was Gordon MacRea, but off-screen Powell was in a romance with actor, dancer Gene Nelson, she wrote in her autobiography. Powell was married to Geary and Nelson was married to choreographer Miriam Nelson. “I fell head over heels in love,” she wrote.
But the publicity about the affair was brutal. “I don’t think the public reaction would have been any worse if I’d killed someone...Lots of Hollywood stars had affairs…all that was nothing new. The difference in my case was my sweet-wholesome-virginal image,” she wrote.
In addition to the headlines like “Could divorce wreck Jane Powell’s Career” and “Is Jane Powell Heartless?,” friends shunned both actors, and there were rumors that Powell would be pulled from the upcoming musical Hit the Deck (1955) (she wasn’t). The end of the affair didn’t come without more pain. While Powell divorced her husband, Gene Nelson told her he wasn’t sure. He and Miriam stayed married until their divorce in 1956.
But despite the low in her personal life, Powell was approaching a high in her professional career —being cast in her most successful film, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954). It was also her last great film role. “I certainly had no idea that the charmingly sensible pioneer girl, Milly, would be my last really wonderful film role,” Powell wrote.
A huge success of 1954, the film was not supposed to be a success, at least in the eyes of MGM heads. Producers poured more funding into the musical film Brigadoon, which was in production at the same time. It was the expectation that Brigadoon was going to be the hit of the year. But it was Seven Brides that was the sleeper success. Unfortunately, while 1954 yielded one of the best movie musicals of the golden era, it was also the beginning of the end of the era. “I was optimistic about the future, but I didn’t know how soon I’d be on my own, without MGM’s support.”
After making Athena (1954), Deep in My Heart (1954) and Hit the Deck, Powell left MGM, later saying she probably only beat being fired by six months since MGM studio head Dore Schary was no longer interested in making musicals. However, Powell only knew life at MGM — signing with the studio since age 14. “For the first time in my life I had to make decisions for myself…I had to take care of myself,” she wrote.
Thinking she would switch to another studio, in reality, Powell made a few other films like The Girl Most Likely (1957) and her last feature film, Enchanted Island (1958) —a role she accepted because she didn’t have to sing and originally her character was supposed to die.
“I didn’t quit the movies, they quit me,” Powell later said, quoted in the 1973 book “The MGM Stock Company: The Golden Era” by James Robert Parish and Ronald L. Bowers.
Following her last feature film in 1958, Powell went on to perform in plays and in night clubs. She made guest appearances on television shows like The Love Boat, Murder, She Wrote and had a recurring role on Growing Pains as the mother of Jason Seaver, played by Alan Thicke.
Because Powell’s career began when she was a child, she felt unprepared for many aspects of adult life, including leaving her home studio of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Like most child stars, Powell also had no idea how much money she was making, where it was going and how to handle finances. “Where the money went I don’t know, but I never got any of it, not even later.” As a teenager she was on a strict $10 allowance, Powell wrote.
She was also unprepared for married life, calling herself very naïve and saying she was twenty-one-going-on-twelve, and the only virgin in town with three children. When she got married to her first husband, ice skater Geary Steffen, Powell didn’t understand sex, and thought she would be pregnant immediately after the first time she had sex. Other than Roddy McDowall, Powell had no close friends to confide in or ask questions. After four divorces, Powell eventually married the fifth and last time to another former child star, Dickie Moore. The two connected while Moore was writing his book on child stars, “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star: But Don't Have Sex Or Take the Car.” Moore and Powell were married in 1988 until his death in 2015. Powell died in 2021.
When later in life she was asked if a child should go into show business, she always said no. For starters, if the talent is there, there is plenty of time. But also, because you only have one childhood.
“I’ll never be a child again, and I feel a real sadness and loss,” she wrote. “…What is most important is your childhood—you can never replace that.”
