Actress June Allyson Dies at 88
Actress-singer-dancer June Allyson, one of the most popular film stars of the 1940s and ’50s, died on Saturday, July 8 at her home in Ojai, California of pulmonary respiratory failure and acute bronchitis after a long illness. She was 88.
Allyson began her career as a teenager in the Broadway revue Sing Out the News (1938), going on to play small roles in the Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein II musical Very Warm for May (1939), the Rodgers and Hart musical Higher and Higher (1940), and Cole Porter’s Panama Hattie (also 1940). In the Porter show, which starred Ethel Merman, Allyson understudied Betty Hutton in the comedic role of Florrie. She went on for five performances when Hutton contracted the measles; it so happened that her performance was seen by producer George Abbott, who immediately offered her the role of Minerva in his next show, the Hugh Martin-Ralph Blane musical Best Foot Forward (1941).
When MGM acquired the film rights to Best Foot Forward, Allyson was invited to Hollywood to recreate her role on screen. She then took a 27-year hiatus from Broadway and became a major movie star, returning to the New York stage only once to replace Julie Harris in the comedy Forty Carats (1968). She also toured for a year in the musical No, No, Nanette.
MGM signed Allyson as a contract player. She began her film career as a dancer and singer but went on to play dramatic roles opposite such actors as Jimmy Stewart, Humphrey Bogart, Van Johnson, and Dick Powell. She fell in love with Powell and the two married in 1945 after he divorced his wife, actress Joan Blondell. Although the marriage was sometimes rocky, it lasted until Powell died in 1963. Then she was briefly married to Powell’s hairdresser, Glenn Maxwell. That union ended in divorce. In 1976, Allyson married David Ashrow, a dentist, to whom she remained wed until her death.
Standing approximately 5’1″ tall and weighing less than 100 pounds, Allyson was beloved for her blonde pageboy hairdo and her Peter Pan collars. Almost always cast as the All-American girl next door or as someone’s sweet, loving, supportive wife, she first attained movie stardom in 1944 when she played opposite Van Johnson in Two Girls and a Sailor. She later appeared with Johnson in High Barbaree (1947), The Bride Goes Wild (1948), Too Young to Kiss (1951), and Remains to Be Seen (1953).
Among Allyson’s other notable films are Her Highness and the Bellboy and The Sailor Takes a Wife, both of which co-starred Robert Walker; Till the Clouds Roll By, a biopic of composer Jerome Kern; The Stratton Story, The Glenn Miller Story, and Strategic Air Command, all of which co-starred Jimmy Stewart; and the 1949 remake of Little Women, in which she played Jo March. In addition to Best Foot Forward, she appeared in the loose screen adaptations of two other Broadway musicals, Girl Crazy and Good News. Among her later movies were The Opposite Sex (1956), My Man Godfrey (1957), and A Stranger in My Arms (1959). Her final film appearance was in MGM’s They Only Kill Their Masters (1972), in which she played a lesbian murderess.
Allyson was born in the Bronx on October 7, 1917, though she gave various birth dates for herself during her lifetime. According to her daughter, Pamela Powell, she was born Eleanor Geisman to a French mother and Dutch father. At age eight, she was crushed by a falling tree limb while riding a bicycle and subsequently spent four years in a neck brace. (She said that she taught herself to dance by watching the movies of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.) She was told that she would never be able to have children because of her accident, so, following her marriage to Powell, the couple adopted their daughter Pamela — but, two years later, Allyson gave birth to their son, Richard.
In her autobiography and in interviews, Allyson freely admitted that she struggled with alcoholism in later life. But she continued to work steadily. She had her own TV series from 1959 to 1961, later appearing as a guest star on The Judy Garland Show and in such series as The Love Boat and Murder, She Wrote. In the 1980s, she became famous to a whole new generation of television viewers as a pitchwoman for Depends adult diapers.
Allyson is survived by her husband, her son, and her daughter.
