Background and career
Debra Paget (born Debralee Griffin; August 19, 1933) is a retired American actress and entertainer. She is perhaps best known for her performances in Cecil B. DeMille's epic The Ten Commandments (1956) and in Elvis Presley's film debut, Love Me Tender (1956), as well as for her snake dance scene in The Indian Tomb (1959).
Paget was born in Denver, Colorado, one of five children of Margaret Allen (née Gibson), a former actress (one source says "ex-burlesque queen"), and Frank Henry Griffin, a painter. The family moved to Los Angeles in the 1930s, to be near the film industry. Paget was enrolled in the Hollywood Professional School when she was 11. Margaret was determined that Debra and her siblings would also make their careers in show business. Three of Paget's siblings, Marcia (Teala Loring), Leslie (Lisa Gaye), and Frank (Ruell Shayne), entered show business. Paget had her first professional job at age 8, and acquired some stage experience at 13 when she acted in a 1946 production of Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Paget's first notable film role was as Teena Riconti in Cry of the City, a 1948 film noir directed by Robert Siodmak for 20th Century Fox studios, where the 14-year-old actress played the girlfriend of a hoodlum played by 38-year-old Richard Conte. Fox liked her and signed her to a long-term contract. She had small roles in several subsequent motion pictures in the next year in Mother Is a Freshman (1949), It Happens Every Spring (1949) and House of Strangers (1949).
Paget's first vehicle for Fox was the successful Broken Arrow with James Stewart. At the age of 16, Paget played a Native American maiden, Sonseeahray ("morningstar"), who falls in love with Stewart's character. Stewart was 42 at the time. From 1950 to 1956, she took part in six original live radio plays broadcast nationally on Family Theater. During that same period, she read parts in four adaptations of recently released and upcoming theatrical feature films on the Lux Radio Theatre program, sharing the microphone with such actors as Burt Lancaster, Tyrone Power, Cesar Romero, Ronald Colman, and Robert Stack. She reprised two of her feature film roles in these broadcasts. Paget had a sizable role in Fourteen Hours (1951) and was reunited with Broken Arrow director Delmer Daves and star Jeff Chandler in Bird of Paradise (1951), playing a similar role as that in Broken Arrow. Paget was the second female lead in Anne of the Indies (1951). She was third billed in Belles on Their Toes (1952) and second billed in Les Misérables (1952), playing Cosette. Paget was Robert Wagner's love interest in Stars and Stripes Forever (1952) and Prince Valiant (1954). In 1953, wearing a blonde wig, she auditioned along with Anita Ekberg and Irish McCalla, among others, for the starring role in Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, which went to McCalla.
Fox finally gave Paget top billing with the swashbuckler and historical fiction epic Princess of the Nile (1954), co-starring Jeffrey Hunter. The film was not a notable success at the box office. However, during the year after Princess of the Nile was released, the fan mail Paget received at 20th Century-Fox studios was topped only by that for Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable. Paget had a substantial supporting role in Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954), starring Victor Mature, the sequel to the earlier The Robe (1953), starring Richard Burton, Jean Simmons and Victor Mature. Like the first film, it was a commercial success. She was Dale Robertson's love interest in The Gambler from Natchez (1954) and played another Native American in the next year's White Feather (1955), playing the sister of Jeffrey Hunter's character, and lover of Robert Wagner's character. Fox loaned Paget and Hunter to Allied Artists to appear in Seven Angry Men (1955). At MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), when Anne Bancroft was injured during filming The Last Hunt (1956), that studio borrowed Paget to substitute and play her role, another Native American character.
Paramount Pictures borrowed her from 20th Century Fox for the part of Lilia, the water girl, in Cecil B. DeMille's biblical epic The Ten Commandments (1956), her most successful film. She had to wear brown contact lenses to hide her blue eyes; she said that "If it hadn't been for the lenses I wouldn't have gotten the part". She also said that the lenses were "awful to work in because the klieg lights heat[ed] them up". The film was a huge success, as was Paget's Fox western, Love Me Tender (1956) alongside Elvis Presley. Paget and Richard Egan were billed above Presley, but it was the explosion of the newly discovered rock 'n roll singer's popularity and charisma that made the film so successful. The River's Edge (1957) was the last film she made for Fox.
Sources
Net-worth figure: Celebrity Net Worth (October 2026), in USD. Biography and career facts: the person's Wikipedia article and linked reporting. Snapshot date for all StarWorth figures: 28 October 2026.
