LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Kathryn Grayson
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Kathryn Grayson was born Zelma Kathryn Elisabeth Hedrick in Winston-Salem, NC on February 9, 1922. This pretty, petite, brunette with a heart-shaped face, was discovered by MGM talent scouts while singing on the radio. MGM quickly signed her to a contract, and she was given acting lessons along with taking countless publicity photos. Kathryn, a coloratura soprano, made her first film in 1941, the movie was a B picture named Andy Hardy's Private Secretary. She soon was cast opposite some of MGM's top musical stars of the 40's, such as, Gene Kelly and Mario Lanza. She was paired with Lanza a few times, but the two apparently never got along.
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Actress Kathryn Grayson is 86. Television journalist Roger Mudd is 80. Actress Janet Suzman is 69. Actress-politician Sheila James Kuehl ("The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis") is 67. Singer-songwriter Carole King is 66. Actor Joe Pesci is 65.
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Mario Lanza and Kathryn Grayson star in this pair of films that went a long way toward proving that opera and Hollywood were compatible. In Midnight Kiss, Lanza plays a truck-driving tenor who gets his big break when the temperamental star walks off the job at the Philadelphia opera company where he works. And in Toast of New Orleans, Grayson plays a snooty opera diva who falls in love with a singing fisherman (Lanza). David Niven ... stars.
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Aspiring diva Prudence Budell (Kathryn Grayson) knew what she wanted in a singing partner…but what she got was an uninspiring, walrus-like snob. "Great tenors are very seldom young, good-looking men who feel the words of opera," the maestro (Jose Iturbi) explained,
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Kathryn Grayson was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina on February 9, 1922. Her childhood was spent in St. Louis where she studied voice before training with Frances Marshall of the Chicago Civic Opera and later was signed by RCA Red Seal records at the age of 15.
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From All Movie Guide: Ever on the lookout for the "new Deanna Durbin", MGM talent scouts discovered coloratura soprano Kathryn Grayson while she was the teenaged vocalist on Eddie Cantor's radio program. Grayson's first film was the 1940 MGM programmer Andy Hardy's Private Secretary, in which she was given the opportunity to sing "Lucia" and "Voices of Spring." Her first leading role was as the title character in MGM's 1942 remake of Rio Rita; years after the fact, Grayson would remember the kindnesses and helpfulness of her co-stars, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. Grayson herself leaned towards "diva" behavior the more popular she became, but audiences were less interested in backstage intrigues and more interested in the end result of such films as Anchors Aweigh (1943), The Kissing Bandit (1948), and The Toast of New Orleans (1950). In many of her best films, notably Showboat (1951) and Kiss Me Kate (1953, in which her curvaceous figure was delightfully emphasized in form-fitting Elizabethan garb), Grayson was teamed with baritone Howard Keel, with whom she would later appear in nightclubs and tour in summer stock. Kathryn Grayson made her last film in 1956; she returned before the cameras in the 1980s on (where else?) Murder She Wrote.
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Kathryn Grayson