Grace Moore

Mary Willie Grace Moore was born on December 5, 1898, in the community of Slabtown, located in Cocke County, Tennessee, in what is now considered part of Del Rio. She was the daughter of Tessa Jane Moore, née Stokely, and Richard Lawson Moore. Before she turned two, the family moved to Knoxville, a transition Moore later described as traumatic, as she found urban life distasteful. The family subsequently relocated to Jellico, Tennessee, where Moore spent her adolescent years. She attended Jellico High School, where she served as captain of the girls basketball team, before enrolling briefly at Ward-Belmont College in Nashville. She then moved to Washington, D.C., to study at Wilson-Greens School of Music in Chevy Chase, Maryland. In 1919 she relocated to New York to pursue a singing career, performing in nightclubs to fund her vocal training. Her first professional singing engagement took place at The Black Cat Café in Greenwich Village.

An American operatic lyric soprano and actress in both musical theatre and film, Moore earned the nickname the Tennessee Nightingale. Her Broadway career began in 1920 with an appearance in the musical revue Hitchy-Koo, written by Jerome Kern. She subsequently appeared in Suite Sixteen, Just a Minute, Town Gossip, and Up in the Clouds. In 1922 and 1923 she took part in the second and third editions of Irving Berlin's Music Box Revues. During the 1923 edition, she and John Steel introduced Berlin's song "What'll I Do," and her performance of "An Orange Grove in California" was accompanied by orange blossom perfume wafted through the theater. In 1932 she returned to Broadway in the short-lived operetta The DuBarry by Karl Millöcker. Her verified Broadway credits from that year also include the musical Hot-Cha! and Divorce.

Following training in France, Moore made her operatic debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City on February 7, 1928, singing the role of Mimì in Puccini's La bohème. She went on to sing Juliette in Roméo et Juliette, which led to a European tour. On September 29, 1928, she debuted at the Opéra-Comique in Paris as Mimì, a role she also performed in a Royal Command Performance at Covent Garden in London on June 6, 1935. Over sixteen seasons with the Metropolitan Opera, she sang in numerous Italian and French operas, including the title roles in Tosca, Manon, and Louise, as well as Carmen, Faust, Pagliacci, and Gianni Schicchi, among others. Louise was her favorite opera and is widely regarded as her greatest role. In 1945 she sang Mimì opposite Nino Martini's Rodolfo in La bohème for the inaugural performance of the San Antonio Grand Opera Festival. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s she gave concert performances across the United States and Europe, performing operatic selections and songs in German, French, Italian, Spanish, and English.

Moore's film career began in 1930 when she played Jenny Lind in A Lady's Morals, produced for MGM by Irving Thalberg and directed by Sidney Franklin. That same year she starred alongside Metropolitan Opera singer Lawrence Tibbett in New Moon, also produced by MGM, the first screen adaptation of Sigmund Romberg's operetta The New Moon. After a hiatus of several years, she returned to Hollywood under contract to Columbia Pictures, for whom she made six films. Her first Columbia picture, One Night of Love in 1934, cast her as a small-town girl aspiring to an opera career, and the performance earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1935. In 1936 she starred as Empress Elisabeth of Austria in Josef von Sternberg's production The King Steps Out. A notable sequence in the 1937 film When You're in Love featured Moore in a flannel shirt and trousers performing Cab Calloway's "Minnie the Moocher" with a five-man band. That same year she performed the Madama Butterfly duet "Vogliatemi bene" with tenor Frank Forest in I'll Take Romance. Her final film was Louise in 1939, an abridged version of Gustave Charpentier's opera of the same name with spoken dialogue replacing portions of the original score. Charpentier himself participated in the production, authorizing changes to the libretto, coaching Moore, and advising director Abel Gance. The film also featured French singers Georges Thill and André Pernet. Moore's films were credited with bringing opera to a broader popular audience.

During World War II, Moore was active in the USO, entertaining American troops abroad. On July 24, 1945, she performed at a gala event titled "Pacifique 45" at the Paris Opera House, organized by the French for the benefit of families of French war veterans, where she sang before a crowd of approximately 20,000 gathered in the square outside the venue. In 1944 she published an autobiography titled You're Only Human Once. Moore died on January 26, 1947, at the age of 48, in a plane crash. In 1953, a film about her life, So This Is Love, was released, starring Kathryn Grayson.