Marion Bell

Marion Lee Bell (November 16, 1919 – December 14, 1997) was an American soprano and musical theatre performer born in St. Louis, Missouri, where her father worked as a freight agent on the Wabash Railroad. She had three sisters — Evelyn, Ruth, and Veronica — and the family relocated to California by the time Bell was fifteen. She is best known for originating the role of Fiona in the Broadway musical Brigadoon in 1947.

Bell began performing at an early age, singing on local radio by age eight with Ted Straeter's orchestra. After MGM signed her to a film contract, she toured with the Marx Brothers in their vaudeville show and appeared in an uncredited role in their 1935 film A Night at the Opera, in which she is briefly seen in the stateroom scene calling out for "Aunt Minnie." She sang a duet from La Traviata with James Melton in Ziegfeld Follies, completed in 1944 and considered her screen debut. A planned starring role in the screen operetta The Kissing Bandit with John Hodiak was announced in 1944 but ultimately came to fruition in 1949 without either performer in the cast.

Alongside her film work, Bell pursued serious operatic training, studying for a year in Rome with Mario Marafioti before returning to the United States as World War II approached. Back in California, she studied with Nina Koshetz and sang leading roles with the San Francisco Opera Company, including the Shepherd in Wagner's Tannhäuser and the young girl in Montemezzi's Love of Three Kings. She also performed with the St. Louis Opera Company and the Opera Nacional in Mexico City. Her MGM contract prevented her from accepting a role in the Lerner-Loewe musical The Day Before Spring in 1945.

Bell's path to Brigadoon began while she was performing in summer stock, when she was encouraged to audition for the production. She traveled to New York City, auditioned, and won the role of Fiona, meeting librettist Alan Jay Lerner for the first time in the process. The production opened in 1947, and critic Brooks Atkinson noted that Bell and David Brooks had "sung rapturously" on "Almost Like Being in Love." For her performance, Bell received the Theatre World Award, the Donaldson Award for best debut performance by an actress in a musical, and a New York Drama Critics Circle Award. She recorded the original cast album of Brigadoon and made additional recordings for RCA Victor, including Smash Hits of Broadway, released on four 10-inch disks featuring songs from multiple Broadway musicals. Brigadoon ran for 581 performances over eighteen months, and that engagement constituted the entirety of Bell's Broadway career, though she was considered as a possible female lead for Kiss Me, Kate.

During the run of Brigadoon, Bell gave a solo recital at Town Hall in New York City, accompanied by Edwin McArthur. The program was ambitious in scope, encompassing works in six languages, including arias by Handel, Bach, Purcell, and Mozart; Russian songs by Rachmaninoff, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Tchaikovsky; de Falla's "Seven Spanish Folk Songs"; and the premieres of "La Bonne Cuisine" by Leonard Bernstein and "A Day Is Born" by Albert Hay Malotte. A New York Times review, signed "N.S.," praised her showmanship and stage presence but faulted her for applying an operetta style to the classical repertoire, finding her most comfortable with Kurt Weill's "Somehow I Could Never Believe" from Street Scene. Bell had previously told the New York World-Telegram during Brigadoon's Boston tryouts that she considered the Broadway musical a lesser art form than opera.

In 1947, Bell married Lerner, becoming the second of his eight wives. The marriage lasted two years; Lerner left her six months after Brigadoon closed its first Broadway run. Her hepatitis, contracted while entertaining troops recovering at a hospital in Waco, Texas, recurred during the show's run and contributed to the mental exhaustion that led to her withdrawal from the production. During the war, Bell had also performed at Camp Roberts, California, in 1945, courtesy of MGM, appearing with Joseph Sullivan in the operetta Naughty Marietta.

In 1948, Bell sang in the world premiere of Kurt Weill and Arnold Sundgaard's folk opera Down in the Valley for the Indiana University Opera Theatre. She appeared in the telecast production that aired in January 1950 as the inaugural broadcast of the NBC Opera Theatre series, and recorded the work for RCA Victor on three 45 rpm disks. In 1947 she was announced as a guest singer on Gordon MacRae's CBS Radio summer series, Troubadour 1947. In 1951, she performed in Three Wishes for Jamie alongside John Raitt and Cecil Kellaway, a production that played at the Los Angeles Philharmonic Auditorium before moving to the Curran Theatre in San Francisco. Over the course of her career, Bell sang in more than 200 concerts and also performed at the St. Louis Municipal Opera, the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera, and the Sacramento Music Circus.

Bell's third husband was actor and singer Tom Charlesworth, whom she met during a production of The Chocolate Soldier. That marriage lasted three months, and the two had a son together. Following the end of her marriage to Lerner and the decline of her performing career, Bell spent much of the following decade hospitalized for mental illness. She returned to California in 1960, where her parents still lived, and supported her son with their help and through various jobs. In the late 1990s, she provided archival film of her Town Hall recital to Classic Arts Showcase television. By 1990, Bell was living in Culver City, where she earned a living giving voice lessons while her cancer was in remission following chemotherapy. She remained in Culver City for the last fifteen years of her life, participating in local light opera and community activities, and died there on December 14, 1997.