Sandra Dee (April 23, 1942 â€" February 20, 2005) was an American actress. Dee began her career as a model and progressed to film. Best known for her portrayal of ingenues, Dee won a Golden Globe Award in 1959 as one of the year's most promising newcomers, and over several years her films were popular. By the late 1960s her career had started to decline, and a highly publicized marriage to Bobby Darin (m. 1960â€"67) ended in divorce.
She rarely acted after this time, and her final years were marred by illness. She died of complications from kidney disease in 2005 at the age of 62.
Birth and background
Dee was born Alexandra Zuck in Bayonne, New Jersey in 1942, the only child of Mary (née Cymboliak) and John Zuck, who met as teenagers at a Russian Orthodox church dance, and married shortly afterward, but divorced before Sandra was 5 years old. She was of Polish and Carpatho-Rusyn ancestry, and was raised in the Russian Orthodox faith.
Her son, Dodd Darin, wrote in his biographical book about his parents, Dream Lovers, that Dee's mother, Mary, and her sister Olga "were first generation daughters of a working class Russian Orthodox couple." Dee recalled, "we belonged to a Russian Orthodox Church, and there was dancing at the social events." Alexandra would soon take the name Sandra Dee. She became a professional model by the age of 4 and subsequently progressed to television commercials.
There has been some dispute as to Dee's actual birth year, with evidence pointing to both 1942 and 1944. Legal records, including her California divorce record from Bobby Darin, as well as the Social Security Death Index (SSDI) and her own gravestone all give her year of birth as 1942. In a 1967 interview with the Oxnard Press-Courier, she acknowledged being 18 in 1960 when she first met Bobby Darin, and the couple wed 3 months later. However, according to her son's book, Dee was born in 1944, but, having begun modelling and acting at a very young age, she and her mother falsely inflated her age by two years so she could find more work. According to this version, this explains why 1942 was listed as her birth year in official studio press releases.
After studying at the Hollywood Professional School, she graduated from University High School in Los Angeles in June 1958. In a 1959 interview, Dee recalled that she "grew up fast," surrounded mostly by older people, and was "never held back in anything [she] wanted to do." During her modeling career, Dee attempted to lose weight to "be as skinny as the high-fashion models," though an improper diet "ruined [her] skin, hair, nailsâ€"everything." Having slimmed down, her body was unable to digest any food she ate, and it took the help of a doctor to regain her health. According to the actress, she "could have killed [herself]" and "had to learn to eat all over again."
Career
Ending her modeling career, Dee moved from New York to Hollywood in 1957. There, she made her first film, Until They Sail, in 1957. The following year, she won a Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year â€" Actress, along with Carolyn Jones and Diane Varsi.
She became known for her wholesome ingenue roles in such films as The Reluctant Debutante (as Rex Harrison's daughter), Gidget, Imitation of Life, and A Summer Place. She later played Tammy in two Universal sequels to Tammy and the Bachelor, in the role created by Debbie Reynolds. After 1970, Dee appeared in relatively few roles; those were mostly in television.
Personal life
Dee's marriage to Bobby Darin in 1960 kept her in the public eye for much of the decade. They met while filming Come September (which was released in 1961). She was under contract to Universal Studios, which tried to develop Dee into a mature actress, and the films she made as an adultâ€"including a few with Darinâ€"were moderately successful. On 16 December 1961, they had one son, Dodd Mitchell Darin (also known as Morgan Mitchell Darin). She and Darin divorced in 1967. Bobby Darin died at age 37 in 1973. She never remarried.
In 1994, Dodd Darin published a book about his parents, Dream Lovers: The Magnificent Shattered Lives of Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee, in which he chronicled his mother's anorexia, drug and alcohol problems, and her claim that she had been sexually abused as a child by her stepfather, Eugene Douvan.
Illness and death
Dee's adult years were marked by poor health. She battled anorexia nervosa, depression, and alcoholism for many years. Complications from kidney disease led to her death on February 20, 2005, at the Los Robles Hospital & Medical Center in Thousand Oaks, California at the age of 62. Her remains are interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Hollywood Hills. Dee was survived by her son, her daughter-in-law and two granddaughters.
In popular culture
- One of the popular songs of the Broadway musical and 1978 movie Grease is "Look at Me, I'm Sandra Dee," in which the rebellious Rizzo satirizes new girl Sandy's clean-cut image, likened to Sandra Dee's.
- Dee's life with Bobby Darin was dramatized in the 2004 film Beyond the Sea, in which Kevin Spacey played Darin and Dee was played by Kate Bosworth.
Selected filmography
Box office rating
For a number of years, exhibitors voted Dee one of the most popular box office stars in the United States:
- 1959â€"16th
- 1960â€"7th
- 1961â€"6th
- 1962â€"9th
- 1963â€"8th
References
External links
- Sandra Dee â€" The Carpathian Connection
- Sandra Dee at the Internet Movie Database
- Sandra Dee at the TCM Movie Database
- Merkin, Daphne (December 25, 2005). "Gidget Doesn't Live Here Anymore". The New York Times. Retrieved May 23, 2010.Â
- Sandra Dee (March 18, 1991). "Learning to Live Again: A Former Teen Queen Shakes Free of Her Humiliating Past to End Years of Self-Hate and Loneliness". People Magazine 35 (10). Retrieved August 16, 2012.Â
- Profile of Sandra Dee; accessed March 24, 2014.
