Iconic singer and TV host Dinah Shore overcame a lot of obstacles on her way to the top.

THE POPULAR SINGER AND TV HOST OVERCAME PERSONAL PAIN AND HEARTBREAK TO BECOME AN AMERICAN ICON

“I’m going to do what I’ve always done, and that is to work!” — Dinah (after breaking up with Burt Reynolds)

The walking embodiment of “pluck,” Dinah Shore was bravely battling ovarian cancer at 77 when the phone rang in her Beverly Hills home. “I called Dinah and said I’d heard she was really ill,” recalls her former boyfriend, actor Burt Reynolds, 82. “And she said, ‘I’m great. I’m playing golf, and it’s all fine.’ She passed away a week or two later. She was the most amazing woman.”

To the end, Dinah lived by the classic entertainer’s motto of “the show must go on.” From her childhood battle with polio, to her mother’s early death and Dinah’s own tireless ability to reinvent herself and build a career that lasted more than 50 years in music, variety shows, movies and television, she never let setbacks bring her down. “There’s no sense in crying about yesterday,” she said. “It’s tomorrow that counts.”

She learned that lesson early. Fannye Rose Shore, as Dinah’s Russian immigrant parents named her, came down with polio at 18 months, which partially paralyzed her right leg. But her mother Anna refused to let her little girl give in to disability, treating her with rigorous exercise and leg massages. “Her mother was a very strongwilled woman,” Michael B. Druxman, author of Miss Dinah Shore, tells Closer. “She wouldn’t let her feel sorry for herself.” Dinah said, “There were relentless dancing lessons, swimming and ballet and in each I had to prove myself. I never wanted sympathy.”

Anna, who’d wanted to pursue a singing career, encouraged her daughter’s artistic pursuits, but just a few days before Fannye was to appear in her school production of Little Women, Anna died suddenly of a heart attack at 44. Their relationship had been complicated. “I never felt that I completely measured up to what Mother was or what she wanted me to be,” Dinah said. But Anna had instilled in her daughter the drive to succeed.

A STAR EMERGES

Dinah soon began performing regularly on entertainer Eddie Cantor’s radio show and changed her name when she became known for her version of the song “Dinah.” Said Eddie, “I never knew anyone who worked so hard.” Still, Dinah initially failed to impress in auditions with big-band leaders Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman. But she decided to “fight it out,” as her father told her to do, because, he reminded her, “Singing’s the thing you like best.” In a few short years, Dinah became the top-charting female singer of the 1940s.

In the 1950s, Dinah, who married actor George Montgomery and had a daughter, Melissa, and adopted a son, John, moved into TV, hosting variety and talk shows. Dinah’s Place even won a 1973 Emmy. NBC congratulated her, but canceled her show in the same telegram, to make way for male-hosted game shows. Dinah didn’t lose a step: She started a new syndicated hit show, Dinah!

It was around then the now-divorced star fell for Burt, 20 years her junior. “He was a man,” she said, “vulnerable and sensitive, funny, mature.” Their three-year relationship was formative for Burt. “There were a lot of new experiences for me [in Hollywood] and I didn’t know what I was doing,” he tells Closer. “I always took her advice.”

Dinah kept working until her death in 1994. “She just kept redefining herself,” Druxman tells

Closer. “She was a modern woman.” And a modern marvel.

— Lisa Chambers, with reporting by Katie

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