Gloria Jean
Child actress and singer whose career faded in her twenties
GLORIA JEAN, who has died aged 92, was described as the girl who threatened to eclipse Deanna Durbin – but did not.
She came to prominence in 1939, after she was discovered by the producer Joe Pasternak while in
New York. She was signed to a lucrative contract to Universal and cast as the lead in several films that made the most of her coloratura singing voice.
She was born Gloria Jean Schoonover on April 14 1926 at Buffalo, New York. The family later moved to Scranton, Pennsylvania. Her mother’s ancestors were from Wales and Gloria began making occasional appearances singing Welsh songs, and standards like Little Annie Rooney, in vaudeville when she was three. Aged five, billed as “Baby Skylark”, she had her own local radio show.
At 13, Gloria was taken to New York by her singing teacher to pursue an operatic career. When Joe Pasternak heard her singing, however he persuaded her initially reluctant mother that she had a future on screen. Pasternak, who had turned a young Edna Mae Durbin into Deanna Durbin, arranged for Gloria’s passage to Hollywood.
Her first feature film, The Under-pup (1939), was a box office hit and Universal partnered her with Bing Crosby in If I Had My Way (1940). The film was a disappointment financially but proved a great showcase for her soprano voice.
Her third outing, A Little Bit of Heaven (1940), saw her starring alongside Robert Stack, with her sister Lois engaged as her stand-in. Gloria’s father was also on the payroll as her chauffeur.
Her mother was uneasy about her daughter being cast as WC Fields’s pretty niece in Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941), as she had heard of his dislike of children and his hard drinking.
But, Gloria Jean recalled, “He was very considerate of me … I never saw WC Fields intoxicated nor even wobble about. He was simply very nice.”
As the 1940s progressed, however, her films tended to the mediocre and in 1945, during a tour of Europe, a booking at the London Casino was a disaster: the audience took little notice of her, and she broke down and ran off the stage in tears. Dates in Cardiff and Birmingham were cancelled. She returned to Hollywood, but not to Universal, who had dropped her.
United Artists thought they could reignite her career and cast Gloria Jean in the comedy Copacabana (1947) with Groucho Marx and Carmen Miranda. But by 1955 she had all but vanished from the scene, and was found working as a hostess in a restaurant opposite Republic Studios. In 1961 Jerry Lewis directed her in The Ladies Man, but by the time of the final edit she had been reduced to a non-speaking bit-part in crowd scenes. She was heartbroken.
“Bing Crosby warned me to remain close to my family, and how the gloss could turn so easily to dross,” she recalled. “I’m glad I did. I gave Hollywood my life – it saw to it that it killed me off.”
The money she had saved from her career was lost to the taxman, and she worked as a receptionist for a cosmetics firm and shared a small apartment with her sister and mother and her son from a brief and unsuccessful marriage to Franco Cellini.
Gloria Jean became a frequent guest at film conventions and autograph shows, and on the death of her mother, who lived to be more than 100, and her sister Bonnie in 2007, she moved to Hawaii to be close to her son and his family.
In 2005, an authorised biography by Scott and Jan Macgillivray, Gloria Jean: A Little Bit of Heaven, was published. Her son died in 2017.