Trivia of Dorothy Lamour

Trivia of Dorothy Lamour (10 December 1914 - 22 September 1996)

*She was a beautiful child who turned heads as a teenager with her long dark hair. However, her dream was to become a professional singer not actress. After she won a beauty contest as Miss New Orleans in 1931, she headed to Chicago to find her work as a singer.She become a vocalist in the Herbie Kaye band.

*She landed an uncredited bit part as a chorus girl in the musical Footlight Parade (1933). She didn't appear in films again until 1936 when she landed a part as a coed in College Holiday (1936).

*In 1936, Dorothy got the part of Ulah in The Jungle Princess (1936) produced by E. Lloyd Sheldon and filmed at Paramount. This film was a tremendous moneymaker as Dorothy stole the show in her wrap-around sarong. Dorothy became an instant star as the child of nature/female Tarzan, raised with a pet tiger among the tropical natives. Ray Milland starred opposite her as the man from civilization who woos and wins her. The scene where Milland is trying to teach her the word kiss is touching yet humorous. When he kisses her and tells her that is a kiss she runs away.The Jungle Princess was a big hit for the studio and Lamour would be associated with sarongs for the rest of her career. It also gave her a hit song "Moonlight and Shadows".

*She went on to play as an exotic girl in the sarong of movies including The Hurricane (1937), Typhoon (1940), Beyond the Blue Horizon (1942), and her final big-screen sarong feature, Donovan's Reef (1963). Although Dorothy actually only wore a sarong in 6 of her 59 pictures, it defined her career.The sarong stayed with her in the Bob Hope / Bing Crosby "Road" pictures for Paramount. The trio starred in Road to Singapore (1940), Road to Zanzibar (1941), Road to Morocco (1942), Road to Utopia (1945) and Road to Bali (1952). A final "Road" picture, "Road to the Fountain of Youth" was in the works in 1977, until Bing Crosby's sudden death.

*"The Moon of Manakoora" from film The Hurricane (1937), was her signature song.

*20th Century Fox borrowed her to play Tyrone Power's leading lady in the gangster film Johnny Apollo (1940). Linda Darnell was the original female lead. Alice Faye' was also considered by Darryl F. Zanuck before Dorothy Lamour was borrowed from Paramount in exchange for Don Ameche.In this movie, Lamour sang "This is the Beginning of the End" and "Dancing for Nickels and Dimes".

*She opened the first of what was meant to be a chain of "Dorothy Lamour" beauty salons in New York's Greenwich Village in 1960, not far from where she had begun her nightclub career in the 1930s.