Jeanne Crain: In the glory days of the studio system, movie stars were identified with one particular studio, becoming part of their company's particular style and aura. From 1943 to 1953, Jeanne Crain, who has died aged 78, was a typical 20th Century Fox girl - charming, youthful and pretty.
Fox, which had a smaller roster of stars than the other major studios, kept their contract players busy, and Crain made an average of two films a year, most of them bright and breezy.
Born in California of Irish-Catholic parents whose own parents emigrated from Mayo, Jeanne (pronounced Jean) Crain won the Miss Long Beach beauty contest in her teens, going on to become Camera Girl of 1942. But she had acting ambitions and, while still at school, took a screen test for Orson Welles for the role of Lucy Morgan in The Magnificent Ambersons. In the event, the slightly older and more experienced Anne Baxter got the part, subsequently pipping her to the post twice more, in All About Eve (1950) and One Desire (1955).
Crain's problem was that she was mainly perceived at Fox as just a comely juvenile, lacking gravitas, and as a result was also passed over in favour of Susan Hayward in With A Song In My Heart (1952) and of Jean Simmons in The Robe (1953).
Occasionally, however, she did get a chance to reveal her ability, as in Elia Kazan's Pinky (1949), playing a girl who has passed for white for years until forced to admit her roots. Kazan later commented: "It stirred up all kinds of hell, but it was a phoney picture. If I made it now, I'd never try to make the Fox backlot look like the South or use Jeanne Crain, the blandest person I ever worked with." Actually, Crain, who was Oscar nominated, was very affecting, though a black actor should have been cast, if that had been possible at the time.
Crain made her first, albeit brief, appearance on screen posing in a bathing costume in Busby Berkeley's garish The Gang's All Here (1943), before being introduced properly to audiences in Home In Indiana (1944), in which she portrayed a horsy girl who rides beautifully but is considered a tomboy.
She played a rather gutsy soldier's wife in Otto Preminger's In The Meantime Darling (1944), but became a real star in the Rogers and Hammerstein musical State Fair (1945), giving a delightfully fresh performance as the love-struck daughter of an Iowa farming family. Although her songs were dubbed by Luanne Hogan (who also dubbed her in subsequent musicals), a record of the hit songs, It's A Grand Night For Singing and It Might As Well Be Spring, was issued under Crain's name.
Crain's rise to stardom coincided with her marriage to Paul Brinkman, a businessman and former small-time actor, who went on to become a top executive with an arms manufacturing company. Her mother opposed the marriage, and the two became estranged for some time thereafter. Crain had the first of their seven children, five of whom survive her, in 1947.
Previously, she had appeared in three successful movies. She was jealous Gene Tierney's sweet foster sister in the lurid Leave Her To Heaven (1945), and Linda Darnell's love rival sister in Preminger's Centennial Summer (1946), in which she "sang" Jerome Kern melodies. Best of all was the engaging period musical Margie (1946), which showed Crain at the top of her form as a schoolgirl (though she was actually 21) with a crush on her French teacher.
She then alternated between playing young wives or teenage daughters in a believable and ingratiating manner. She was married to William Holden in Apartment For Peggy (1948), and to bandleader Dan Dailey in You Were Meant For Me (1948). For Mankiewicz, in the stringent social comedy A Letter To Three Wives (1949), she was a shy newlywed, and, in People Will Talk (1951), she was the pregnant medical student whom gynaecologist Cary Grant marries to prevent her from committing suicide or having an abortion.
In both Cheaper By The Dozen (1950), and its sequel Belles On Their Toes (1952), Crain was the oldest of Myrna Loy's 12 children, though she did the latter unwillingly after Zanuck refused to loan her out to Paramount for Carrie, opposite Laurence Olivier. There was another disappointment when she had to turn down a lead in Three Coins In The Fountain because her husband refused to let her go on location to Rome - though, in an attempt to compensate, he built his wife a studio in which to enjoy her hobby of painting.
Prior to asking Fox to release her in 1953, she made George Cukor's enchanting The Model And The Marriage Broker (1952), and she was touching as the poverty-stricken young wife of Farley Granger in The Gift Of The Magi episode from O Henry's Full House (1952).
In 1954 she won the "Irish Screen Award" from the Ancient Order of Hibernians in Hollywood whose California president, Charles Horan, said the prize was "not only for her outstanding work in motion pictures, but also for her off-screen conduct and her admirable Catholic family life which conforms to the faith and traditions of the Irish people".
Away from Fox, and now in her 30s, Crain made a conscious decision to break with her dewy-eyed juvenile past, dying her hair red and taking on gutsier and sexier roles. Thus she appeared in westerns as bold ranchers, matching Kirk Douglas in Man Without A Star (1955) and Alan Ladd in Guns Of The Timberland (1962), and as sophisticated women, as in The Joker Is Wild (1957), playing nightclub comedian Frank Sinatra's wife.
As the Hollywood studio system broke up, she followed many other American stars to Italy, to appear in hokum costume epics. She was one of the Roman procurator's lovers in Pontius Pilate (1961), and a languid Nefertiti in Queen Of The Nile (1962). Meanwhile, her marriage was going through turbulent times, but although Crain sued Brinkman for divorce in 1956, the decree never became final and they got back together again.
Among her last films, when the pickings became slim, were Hot Rods To Hell (1967), in which she and Dana Andrews were parents terrified by young people with souped-up cars; Skyjacked (1972), as a passenger on a plane piloted by Charlton Heston; and The Night God Screamed (1973), playing a court witness hunted by a murderous hooded figure after her testimony had sent other defendants to death row. It was a long way from those well-scrubbed roles in guileless Fox movies of the 1940s.
Jeanne Crain; born May 25th, 1925; died December 14th, 2003