June Allyson

June Allyson, born Eleanor Geisman on October 7, 1917, in the Bronx, New York City, was an American actress whose career spanned stage, film, and television. She died on July 8, 2006, at the age of 88, of respiratory failure and bronchitis. Her father, a janitor and alcoholic, abandoned the family when Allyson was six months old, leaving her mother to work as a telephone operator and restaurant cashier while Allyson was largely raised by her maternal grandparents. In 1925, a tree branch fell on her while she rode her tricycle, fracturing her skull and breaking her back; her doctors predicted she would never walk again and fitted her with a steel brace from neck to hips for four years. She eventually recovered and, after her mother remarried and the family's financial situation stabilized, enrolled in the Ned Wayburn Dancing Academy, competing under the stage name Elaine Peters.

After leaving high school during her junior year, Allyson worked as a tap dancer at the Lido Club in Montreal before returning to New York City to appear in short films produced by Educational Pictures at its Astoria studio. Those shorts, made in 1937 and 1938, featured her alongside performers including Danny Kaye and included titles such as Swing for Sale, Pixilated, and Dime a Dance. When Educational ceased operations, she moved to Vitaphone in Brooklyn, appearing in additional musical shorts through 1940.

Allyson's Broadway career began in 1938, when she landed a chorus role in Sing Out the News. She subsequently appeared in the chorus of the Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II musical Very Warm for May in 1939. When Vitaphone discontinued its New York productions in 1940, she returned to the stage, taking chorus roles in Rodgers and Hart's Higher and Higher and Cole Porter's Panama Hattie, both in 1940. During the run of Panama Hattie, she served as understudy to lead Betty Hutton and stepped into the role for five performances when Hutton contracted measles. Director George Abbott attended one of those performances and cast Allyson in a lead role in his 1941 production of Best Foot Forward. Her Broadway activity continued through 1971, and she later returned to the stage in the 1970s in productions of Forty Carats and No, No, Nanette.

MGM selected Allyson for the 1943 film version of Best Foot Forward, and while awaiting the start of that production she appeared in Girl Crazy. Musical supervisor Arthur Freed championed her and secured her a studio contract. Her breakthrough came with Two Girls and a Sailor in 1944, in which she was paired with Van Johnson; the two were subsequently cast together in six films throughout the mid-1940s. In 1951, Allyson received the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress for her performance in Too Young to Kiss. From 1959 to 1961 she hosted and occasionally starred in The DuPont Show with June Allyson, an anthology series that aired on CBS.

In 1982, Allyson published her autobiography, June Allyson by June Allyson, and continued working in guest roles on television and in occasional films through 2001, when she made her final onscreen appearance. She founded the June Allyson Foundation for Public Awareness and Medical Research, which raised funds for research into urological and gynecological diseases affecting senior citizens, and during the 1980s she served as a spokesperson for Depend undergarments in a campaign credited with reducing the social stigma surrounding incontinence. Allyson was married four times to three husbands and had two children with her first husband, actor Dick Powell.