Just a day after the loss of her daughter Carrie Fisher, the actress Debbie Reynolds has died. Fisher herself had commented on her mother's frail health in recent months, and Reynolds finally suffered a stroke yesterday. She was 84.
Born Mary Francis Reynolds in 1932, she was raised in Texas, and moved to Burbank, California with her family when she was 16. After winning the Miss Burbank beauty contest she soon found herself with a screen contract at the nearby Warner Brothers studio, and it was the mogul Jack Warner who re-christened her with the stage-name Debbie. Her first film role was an uncredited walk-on in 1948's June Bride, and her first speaking role was in The Daughter Of Rosie O'Grady two years later.
Throughout the rest of the 1950s she was a staple player in Hollywood musicals like Two Weeks With Love and Tammy And The Bachelor (with Leslie Neilsen), both of which gave her hit records (Reynolds was the best-selling recording artist in the US in 1957). Greatest of them all, of course, was 1952's Singin' In The Rain, in which she played the ingenue with the wonderful voice, who wows the film industry just as it's panicking about the arrival of talking pictures, and wins the heart of Gene Kelly.
Her roles afterwards tended to be variations on that plucky innocent in films like The Affairs of Dobie Gillis (1953), Susan Slept Here (1954), Bundle of Joy (1956), The Catered Affair (1956) and How The West Was Won (1962). Occasional attempts to cast her against type, like The Rat Race (1960, with Tony Curtis) and Divorce American Style (1967, with Dick Van Dyke) were less successful, although she received an Oscar nomination for the bumptious title role in the unlikely Titanic-based musical The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964).
As the film roles began to dry up towards the end of the 1960s, she moved more towards television and the stage. She revived the musical Irene on Broadway in 1973 (giving her daughter Carrie her stage debut into the bargain), and followed it with the self-titled revue Debbie and the Western musical Annie Get Your Gun in subsequent years. There was also a US stage tour of The Unsinkable Molly Brown in 1989. As recently as 2008 she played Irene again in Australia, and had another one-woman show, Debbie Reynolds: Alive And Fabulous in London's West End in 2010.
Her TV work, meanwhile, included the short-lived NBC sit-com The Debbie Reynolds Show from 1969-70, which Reynolds herself pulled the plug on in a row with the network over cigarette advertising. She made appearances in Perry Mason, Roseanne and The Golden Girls, and won an Emmy for her recurring role as Grace's mother Bobbie on the sit-com Will & Grace.
Away from the spotlight she at various points owned a dance studio, a hotel and casino, and wrote a column for tabloid Globe. She was also an enthusiastic collector of movie memorabilia, for a time even operating museums in LA and Las Vegas.
She married three times: to singer Eddie Fisher in 1955; to businessman Harry Karl in 1960; and to real estate developer Richard Hamlett in 1984. Her two children were Todd and Carrie Fisher, and her fractious relationship with Carrie formed part of the basis of the latter's Postcards From The Edge. Shirley MacLaine played the fictionalised Reynolds in the 1990 film version.
Todd Fisher released a statement yesterday, saying "The last thing [Debbie] said this morning was that she was very, very sad about losing Carrie and that she would like to be with her again."