Hollywood Golden Age star Jane Powell has passed away at the age of 92 on Thursday.
Jane died of natural causes at her home in Wilton, Connecticut, film critic and longtime pal Susan Granger told The Hollywood Reporter.
Her roles in the Hollywood musicals A Date With Judy and Royal Wedding were her most well-known.
She played Milly, a boarding-house cook who falls in love with frontier farmer Adam and sets out to teach his six brothers a thing or two about manners, in 1954’s Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.
This film, which was nominated for five Oscars, is one the most loved MGM films.
Jane also stepped in for June Allyson (who was pregnant) and then Judy Garland (who was fired after missing a rehearsal) to play the wise-cracking sister of Fred Astaire’s character in Donan’s first solo directing effort, the musical romance Royal Wedding in 1951.
She also starred in musicals Two Weeks With Love (1950), Athena (1954) and the Seven Brides follow-up — and Hit the Deck (1955), with all three co-starring Debbie Reynolds.
More recently, Jane played the widowed mother of Alan Thicke’s home-bound psychiatrist character on the ABC sitcom Growing Pains and had stints on the daytime soap operas As the World Turns and Loving and as a woman with dementia on a 2002 episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
Born Suzanne Lorraine Burce on April 1, 1929, in Portland, Oregon, she sang an aria to win a talent contest on Janet Gaynor’s Stars Over Hollywood radio program.
“We had other advantages, obviously. It was exciting,” she told the Chicago Tribune in 2011.
“You got to meet people you’d never otherwise get to meet. But there’s something young people miss if they don’t have the usual progression from kindergarten to grade school to high school, all of that. There were no sleepovers, no girls’ nights. I didn’t know anybody. It was a lonely life, really.”
One of her numbers, “Too Much in Love,” received an Oscar nomination for best original song.
Jane Powell was her character in the film and was given that name as her stage name.
Jane was married five more times to Geary Steffen before she was finally wed to Dickie, a former child star, who passed away in September 2015.
Elizabeth Taylor, her Date With Judy costar, was one of Jane’s bridesmaids at her very first wedding. Elizabeth was also her bridesmaid at Conrad Hilton’s first wedding.
Jane is survived by Geary, Suzanne, and Lindsay, her children and grandchildren Skye, Tia, and Lindsay.