Sandra Dee played the wholesome girl on the brink of growing up, and for a few years around 1959 Hollywood wanted nothing else from her. The image was the career; when it went out of fashion, so did she.
Fi1m perspective
The Sandra Dee part is easy to describe. She is sixteen or thereabouts, pert and wholesome, and about a summer away from finding out about boys. In Gidget (1959) the girl is sunny and tomboyish and the summer is spent on a beach, and a whole run of beach films followed her onto the sand. In A Summer Place (1959) she is Molly Jorgenson, opposite Troy Donahue, the same girl a year on and starting to notice. Hollywood found the type in 1959 and, for a while, could not think of anything else to do with her.
She had been a child model in New York, made her screen debut in Until They Sail (1957), and did light comedy in The Reluctant Debutante (1958). Then the three 1959 films arrived within months of each other and settled the matter. Universal and the producer Ross Hunter, who made nine films with her, kept her in glossy melodramas and light romantic comedies into the early 1960s, three of them opposite Bobby Darin and three opposite John Gavin. Critics then and since have mostly noticed the same two things: that she was a natural fit for the sunny parts, and that she could be fragile and direct in scenes with a screen mother.
The one of hers we have reviewed is Imitation of Life (1959), and it shows what the type cost her. We scored the film 86, and almost none of that is her half of it. Douglas Sirk's picture is two films, and the one that has lasted belongs to Juanita Moore and Susan Kohner. Dee is in the other one, as Lana Turner's neglected daughter, and in the last third she is handed a storyline whose purpose we could see and did not believe for a minute. We sat through it waiting to be moved and were not; the film keeps its real feeling for the other mother and the other daughter, and Susie is left holding a plot.
That is the shape of the career. Writers gave her a plot and the studio gave her an image, and the image was guarded closely. In 1967, at twenty-five, she told an interviewer, "Little Sandra Dee isn't supposed to smoke, you know." By then the audience had moved on. Universal dropped her the same year, and what followed was occasional film and television into the early 1980s, including The Dunwich Horror (1970), a rare later lead and a turn towards horror.
Whether she could have done more with harder parts we cannot tell from what we have seen; the harder parts did not come. See Imitation of Life, as we said in our review, for Moore and Kohner. Dee is in the half of the picture that has not worn well, doing what the studio asked of her, which was to stay sixteen for as long as the audience would have it.
Biography
Sandra Dee, born Alexandra Zuck, was an American actress. She began her career as a child model in New York before making her film debut in Until They Sail (1957).
Dee became known for her roles as a teenage ingénue, including Susie (16) in Imitation of Life (1959), the title character in Gidget (1959) and Molly Jorgenson in A Summer Place (1959). She received a Golden Globe Award as one of the most promising new actresses for her work in Until They Sail.
Her other credits include The Reluctant Debutante (1958), Come September (1961) and The Dunwich Horror (1970). She was married to singer and actor Bobby Darin from 1960 to 1967.
