The girl who one day would be known as "Winnipeg's Sweetheart" was born at Grace Hospital on December 4, 1921, as Edna Mae Durbin. In her early childhood there were no obvious signs that one day she would be a bigger box office attraction than Shirley Temple. Renamed Deanna Durbin for show business purposes, by age 14 she was the most highly paid female star in the world. Her major motion pictures were Three Smart Girls, Mad About Music and That Certain Age. By the time she was 18 her income was $250,000 a year. Her voice was often described as "natural and beautiful" and her version of "One Fine Day" from Madame Butterfly, with Leopold Stokowski conducting the orchestra, became a classic. Deanna was a Hollywood star in every way. There were Deanna Durbin dolls and dresses. An engineering firm named its so-called dream home in her honor. Her first screen kiss was described in a headline story across the continent. What makes Deanna Durbin's story different is that she was never comfortable with adulation. When she was at the top of her career as Hollywood's leading actress and singer, she turned her back on that world for a life of seclusion. Her first two marriages had failed, and before she married her third husband, director Charles David, she set one condition: he had to promise that she could have what she yearned for - "the life of nobody". Her seclusion is incomplete. She lives in the French village of Neauphlé-le-Château, and for over 35 years has resisted every approach from film companies. Her husband has told journalists that "Mario Lanza pleaded with her for years to make a film with him. But she will never go back to that life." She has not been interviewed since 1949.
It Started with Eve (1941): $400,000

Was given a special Juvenile Oscar in 1938. Was an option to play Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. By twenty-one, she was the highest-paid woman in the United States and highest-paid female film star in the World. Deanna Durbin dolls existed along with many other types of merchandising in the 1940s. Universal Pictures top star in the 1940s where she was paid $400,000 per film. She is reported as the star who saved the company. Tried for the voice of Snow White in Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs but Disney himself rejected her, claiming she sounded "too mature." She was 14 at the time. Has an older sister, Edith, a teacher. Daughter, Jessica Louise Jackson, born in 1946 In 1980, she submitted a recent photo of herself to Life Magazine in order to silence rumors she was overweight She was sought for the female leads of the original Broadway productions of both Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II's "Oklahoma!" (1943) and Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe's "My Fair Lady" (1956). Universal refused to loan her for Oklahoma! and she turned down the lead in My Fair Lady (after Lerner personally came to her home to audition the songs for her) because, as she said later, "I had my ticket for Paris in my pocket." She was the number one female box office star in Britain for the years 1939-1942 inclusive. She was so popular that in 1942 a seven day "Deanna Durbin Festival" was held during which her films were screened exclusively on the Odeon Theatre Circuit throughout Britain, a feat that has never been duplicated for any other star. According to reports from the BBC over the past three decades, it receives more requests from the public for Durbin's films and recordings, than for those of any other star of Hollywood's Golden Age. She was Holocaust victim Anne Frank's favorite movie star. There are two pictures of Durbin on Anne's "Movie Wall" in the secret annex in Amsterdam where Frank and her family hid from the Nazis. In 1941, Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini published an open letter to Durbin in his official newspaper, "Il Popolo", asking her to intercede with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on behalf of American youth to dissuade him from becoming involved in Word War II. She didn't. She was Prime Minister Winston Churchill's favorite movie star. He reportedly insisted that he be permitted to screen her films privately before they were released to the public in Britain, and would often screen her film One Hundred Men and a Girl to celebrate British victories during World War II. He considered her "a formidable talent." When the reign of Universal's founder Carl Laemmle ended abruptly in the Spring of 1936, the new studio head, Charles 'Buddy' Rogers quickly signed the 15-year old when he heard her MGM contract had expired. Deanna rapidly became 'New Universal's' biggest star. She literally single-handedly saved the studio from bankruptcy in the last years of the 1930's.