DEBBIE REYNOLDS – AT 10:56 A.M. ET:   The death of Debbie Reynolds, coming just a day after the untimely passing of her daughter, Carrie Fisher, is heartbreaking enough.  But Debbie Reynolds also leaves an important film legacy. 

Until her death yesterday, Debbie was one of only two surviving stars from the great age of MGM film musicals.  Now, only Leslie Caron lives.  She played Gigi in the last of the MGM musical classics, and earlier starred opposite Gene Kelly in "An American in Paris."  Both films won the Academy Award for best picture.  No, they don't make films like that anymore, and how sad.

The MGM musicals were produced by the "Freed unit," run by Arthur Freed, himself an accomplished lyricist. 

Debbie Reynolds was known primarily for her starring role (with Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor) in "Singin' in the Rain," considered by many to be the most perfect screen musical ever produced.  When it was released in 1952, it made little noise, got no awards, and faded away.  But over the years the audience for the movie grew, helped by exposure on television, and it made Debbie an enduring star.  She recalled how grueling the work was – and how Fred Astaire privately taught her the finer points of screen dancing. 

Her film stardom did not last long.  Although she was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance as the lead in "The Unsinkable Molly Brown" (1964), film musicals were falling out of favor, and her image as the innocent "America's sweetheart" was being challenged by a new generation of assertive women.  Her offscreen life seemed to get more attention than her roles, especially her being dumped by husband Eddie Fisher, who proceeded to marry Elizabeth Taylor.  Debbie got public sympathy, but little else.  Eddie Fisher got Elizabeth Taylor for a short time, and little else. 

She worked to the end, running a hotel and a film museum in Las Vegas, celebrating a glorious but past age.  She had pleaded with the "businessmen" who ran MGM in the 1970s to preserve their back lots, still filled with film sets, as a tourist destination, but they didn't see the potential that Debbie saw, and sold the land at the bottom of the market.   

Debbie is gone now, but Leslie Caron still lives.  And we will always have those movies, and that music.

December 29, 2016