June Knight

June Knight, born Margaret Rose Valliquietto on January 22, 1913, in Los Angeles, was an American actress, dancer, and singer who worked in theatre and film. She died on June 16, 1987, following complications from a stroke, and was buried at Pierce Brothers Valhalla Memorial Park.

Knight's early life was marked by serious illness. At age four she was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and doctors warned her parents that she was unlikely to survive into adulthood. She also contracted polio, which left her unable to walk until she was five. Despite these setbacks, she began performing songs and dances publicly by the time she was ten.

Her stage name came from an unusual circumstance. When she first partnered professionally with dancer John Holland, she took the name June Knight — the same name Holland's previous dance partner had used. She later registered the name in 1931, and in 1940 she successfully pursued a legal case against the original dancer, who had continued using it, arguing that she had made the name widely known.

Knight's Broadway career ran from 1932 to 1947 and encompassed five productions. Her first was Hot-Cha! in 1932, the last of the Ziegfeld Follies shows, in which she appeared at age nineteen. That same year she was also in Take a Chance. In 1935 she appeared in Jubilee, the Cole Porter musical in which she introduced the song "Begin the Beguine." Her fourth credit, The Would-Be Gentleman in 1946, was her only non-musical Broadway appearance. She closed her Broadway career with the musical Sweethearts in 1947.

Alongside her stage work, Knight appeared in twelve films between 1930 and 1940. Her most prominent screen credit was Broadway Melody of 1936, in which she performed the song "I've Got a Feelin' You're Foolin'" opposite Robert Taylor. In 1960, she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contributions to the motion picture industry.

Knight married four times. Her first husband was Palm Beach stockbroker Paul Ames, though the marriage lasted only nine days before he filed for divorce. She subsequently married Texas oilman Arthur A. Cameron, and after that marriage ended she wed Carl B. Squier, co-founder of Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, whose previous wife had died in a plane crash eleven years earlier. That marriage lasted eighteen years, ending with Squier's death. Knight then married Jack Buehler, a colleague and friend of Squier's at Lockheed.

In 1935, Knight was bound, gagged, and robbed of jewelry in her nineteenth-floor New York apartment by two men who had gained entry by posing as film executives. Police connected the incident to a similar robbery of actress Janice Dawson, in which the perpetrators had posed as literary agents.