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Sandra Dee: Universal Pictures
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Sandra Dee was the screen's original Gidget, the budding teenage girl who struggles to be considered an equal by older, *wiser* teenage boys. She ... yearns through her first love, sighing and setting her sights on the elusive Moondoggie (James Darren). Scarcely two years after entering motion pictures, Dee is a mesmerizing presence, as Gidget smiles and plots her insertion and advancement though a gang of California surfers in the prototypical beach party flick.
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Frederick Kohner about his surfer daughter Kathy, "Gidget" (a nickname for a "girl-midget") first became popular in a 1959 film version that starred Sandra Dee as the surf-and-boy-loving Francine "Gidget" Lawrence. The movie led to two sequels, and in 1965, Columbia Pictures' television arm Screen Gems decided to turn 'Gidget' into a half-hour comedy. Fresh-faced 18-year-old Field, who had graduated from a Columbia acting workshop, was tapped to play the title role; she beat 75 other teenage girls for the part. starred as Gidget's sister and brother-in-law.
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Playing the neglected daughter of a driven, manipulative Broadway star (Lana Turner), Ms. Dee projected a genuinely touching fragility, and convincingly turned on her uncaring mother in one notable scene. ''Imitation of Life'' was Universal's biggest success of the 1950's, and prompted the studio to reunite Ms. Dee and Turner in the garish crime thriller ''Portrait in Black.''
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Dee soon proved to be as at home in melodrama as in comedy. She moved to Universal Studios to make "Restless Years," portraying the daughter of a neurotic woman trapped in a stifling small town.
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"I thought they were my friends," Dee said in an interview with the AP at the time. "But I found out on the last picture (A Man Could Get Killed) that I was simply a piece of property to them."
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