★ Kathryn Grayson A Tribute ★ 6.Johann Strauss Voices of Spring

★ Kathryn Grayson A Tribute ★ 6.

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Kathryn Grayson A Tribute (1922-2010)
Johann Strauss Voices of Spring

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Part 1
The Guardian UK
Kathryn Grayson obituarySinger and Hollywood star best known for her roles in MGM musicals of the 1940s and 50s
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Ronald Bergen guardian.co.uk, Friday 19 February 2010 18.04 GMT Article history
When coloratura soprano Kathryn Grayson, who has died aged 88, sang five songs, including an aria from La Traviata, in MGM's all-star patriotic parade, Thousands Cheer (1943), she began her 10-year reign as the prima donna of Hollywood. With her china-doll features, little turned-up nose and patrician manner, Grayson raised the tone of more than a dozen musicals. Although opera managers did not beat a path to her door, her clear, slightly shrill, small voice carried well on film in popular classics and operatic scenes.

Her classical training led her not to the opera house, but to the radio, in particular The Eddie Cantor Show, on which she was discovered by an MGM talent scout at the age of 18 in 1940. In the same year, she married the minor film actor John Shelton.

In her first film, Grayson, who was born Zelma Hedrick in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, played the title role opposite Mickey Rooney in Andy Hardy's Private Secretary (1941), in which she sang Johann Strauss's Voices of Spring prettily. The following year, loaned out to RKO, she chirped a few songs in Rio Rita, a vehicle for Abbott and Costello. At MGM, she was the charming juvenile lead in Seven Sweethearts and The Vanishing Virginian, both directed by Frank Borzage. However, her career, like her voice, hit the heights with Thousands Cheer (1943), in which Grayson, in uniform, lifted wartime audiences' spirits by singing The United Nations March, with music by Dmitri Shostakovich.

The Hungarian-born producer Joe Pasternak, who had been the mentor of teenage canary Deanna Durbin at Universal, and had a taste for well-scrubbed nubile sopranos, now found a new protegee in Grayson. He produced seven of her musicals, in which he attempted to bring a whiff of the concert hall and the opera house and to spread mittel-European schmaltz into mittel-America.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/feb/19/kathryn-grayson-obituary

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[1peterpann]

The world was a little happier when she sang and pretty to!