Tout Passe...

And so we live in a world suddenly Gaborless. It seems a fitting ending to this wretched, dreary year.

Centenary Star

So she's 100 today, this dewy-eyed ingenue. I suppose it's hindsight, but it seems to me that even here, at the very earliest end of her long journey, there's more to her than meets the eye. Now, some 80 years later, it's indisputable: Miss Olivia de Havilland is very much the real thing.

Kiss the Cares Away

Sad news in the Gray Lady, and unexpected in that brings up a name not all that familiar in the last decade or four: Kitty Kallen, wartime sweetheart and big band stalwart, has headed off to Fabulon.

Miracle of 34th Street

Like most great stars, she had a face the camera loved; even more, she had a coloring that the tricky, fickle Technicolor camera turned into something as rich as cream and as a invigorating as a dose of cinnamon.

Goodnight Mrs. Ziegfeld, Wherever You Are

And as the year ends, another chapter closes...

The Younger Sister Says Goodbye...

Last night I dreamed she went to Manderley again...

RIP: The Girl Who Walked Away

Another great one gone: Universal's savior, the little girl with the prima donna voice, Deanna Durbin.  As this shot proves, she had the moxie to make it as a grown-up star, but instead left for France and more than six decades of what sounds like a perfectly happy and rewarding private life.  Her resolute silence has meant that she's a comparative unknown, but one had only to see the expression on Mother Muscato's face when her name came up to know what a Very Big Star she had been (she was on a very short list of Mother's Immortals, a curiously mixed ensemble that in addition to Deanna included Mary Martin, Roberta Peters, Gordon MacRae, crooner Al Martino, and, in later years, Sade, whom she referred to exclusively phonetically, as "Sayd").

Meanwhile, in a shadowy lair high above Grosvenor Square, the fine-veined hand of Luise Rainer crosses off another name...