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Julie London
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Julie London was born Julie Peck in Santa Rosa California on September 26, 1926. She sang as a teenager in a band on the West Coast, prior to her first film appearance. She attended Hollywood Professional High School and graduated in 1944. She was discovered by talent agent Sue Carol (the wife of actor Alan Ladd) while an elevator operator. She appeared in her first film, Nabonga, in 1944. Her first public professional singing performance was at the 881 Club.
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Julie London (September 26, 1926–October 18, 2000) was an American singer and actress. Best known for her smoky, sensual voice, as a singer she was at her peak in the 1950s; her acting career lasted more than 35 years, ending with the role of nurse Dixie McCall, RN, on the TV show Emergency! (1972–1979).
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Born Julie Peck in Santa Clara, California, in 1926, sultry Julie London enjoyed a long career in films and the recording industry. Her parents had a vaudeville act and when the act moved to radio in the 1930s, London began singing on the show. In 1943, while still a teenager, she was discovered by agent and former actress Sue Carol and landed her first film role in Nabonga (1944). At the same time, London pursued a singing career with the Matty Malnech Orchestra. Several more films followed, but when London married actor/producer/director Jack Webb in 1947, she cooled her career to raise a family. After having two daughters, the couple parted ways in 1954, and London eventually went back to acting and embarked upon a highly successful singing career.
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Sultry blues vocalist Julie London began her film career long before she achieved fame as a recording artist. In 1945, 18-year-old London was selected to play a bargain-basement jungle princess, appearing opposite a gorilla in the PRC cheapie Nabonga. She was pretty bad, but no worse than the film itself. By the time she was cast as a sexy teenager in The Red House (1947), her acting had improved immensely, and by the time she played the female lead in the 1951 programmer The Fat Man, it looked as though she actually had a future in films. Still, London's greatest claim to fame was her long string of hit records ("Cry Me a River" et. al.) of the 1950s; many male admirers bought her albums simply to gaze upon her come-hither countenance on the dust jacket. Her status as every red-blooded American boy's wish dream was gently lampooned in Frank Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It (1956), in which she appears as a spectral vision who transfixes a wistful Tom Ewell.
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The most remarkable thing about Julie London is remarkable indeed: that she used her erotic persona not so much to interpret songs as to change the nature of them to become something other than when sung by anyone else. Ella Fitzgerald or Sarah Vaughan or Peggy Lee may have sung the definitive version of this or that tune, but London wasn’t playing the same game. This may be a function of her coming to recording only after starting a career as an actress. Born Julie Peck in 1926, London made her first movie in 1944 and had already been a sexpot in 13 films by the year of her first album (1956). As a singer she had technical limitations, but as an actress she knew how to work within these to create a song style consistent with the seductress image – and luckily, among her many physical attributes she had the ears to make it a highly musical style. She used her breathy, sexy, sultry voice (to use three of the 13 most often used Julie London adjectives – see Greg Gardner’s excellent London website for the other nine) not to sing a version of a song that could compete with someone else's on a scale of good to better to best, but to change it's meaning.
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A sultry, smokyvoiced master of understatement, Julie London enjoyed considerable popularity during the cool era of the 1950s. London never had the range of Ella Fitzgerald or Sarah Vaughan, but often used restraint, softness, and subtlety to maximum
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Julie London