Background and career
Francesca Marlene de Czanyi von Gerber (September 4, 1931 – October 17, 2024), known professionally as Mitzi Gaynor, was an American actress, dancer and singer. Her notable films included We're Not Married! (1952), There's No Business Like Show Business (1954), The Birds and the Bees (1956), and South Pacific (1958) – for which she was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Comedy or Musical at the 1959 awards. Gaynor was one of the last surviving actresses of the "Golden Age" of the Hollywood musical.
Mitzi Gaynor was born Francesca Marlene de Czanyi von Gerber in Chicago on September 4, 1931, to Henry de Czanyi von Gerber, a violinist, cellist, and music director of Hungarian descent, and his wife Pauline, a dancer. By her father's second marriage, she became stepsister to antiwar activist Donald W. Duncan. The family first moved to Elgin, Illinois, then to Detroit, and later, when she was 11, to Hollywood. At age 8, she started training as a ballerina and began her career in the corps de ballet. At 13, she was singing and dancing with the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera company.
Gaynor signed a seven-year contract with 20th Century Fox at age 17. She sang, acted, and danced in a number of film musicals, often paired with some of the male musical stars of the day. A Fox Studio executive thought Mitzi Gerber sounded like the name of a delicatessen, so they came up with a name that used the same initials. Gaynor made her film debut in the musical My Blue Heaven (1950); Betty Grable and Dan Dailey starred and she had a supporting role. A college drama Take Care of My Little Girl (1951) followed, with Gaynor playing the roommate of Jeanne Crain.
Fox then gave Gaynor a star part playing Lotta Crabtree in the musical biopic Golden Girl (1951). It was a modest success at the box office. Gaynor was one of several stars in the 1952 anthology comedy We're Not Married! and was top-billed in the 1952 musical Bloodhounds of Broadway, which made $2 million (equivalent to $24.25 million in 2025). Fox cast her in The I Don't Care Girl (1952) as Eva Tanguay. The film made $1.25 million. Gaynor starred in Down Among the Sheltering Palms (1953), playing a South Sea island girl. She was the female lead in Three Young Texans (1954). Gaynor's most popular film in her time at Fox was Irving Berlin's There's No Business Like Show Business (1954). She was billed after Ethel Merman, Donald O'Connor, Marilyn Monroe, Dan Dailey, and Johnnie Ray.
Gaynor married Jack Bean, a talent agent and public relations executive for MCA, in San Francisco on November 18, 1954. Their home was on North Arden Drive in Beverly Hills, California. She had just been released from 20th Century-Fox (before the start of There's No Business Like Show Business) with four years left on her contract, and decided that since she had the time off, she would get married. The union was childless. After their marriage, Bean quit MCA, started his publicity firm named Bean and Rose, and managed Gaynor's career.
In 1956, Gaynor appeared in the Paramount remake of Anything Goes, co-starring Bing Crosby, Donald O'Connor, and Zizi Jeanmaire, loosely based on the musical by Cole Porter, P. G. Wodehouse, and Guy Bolton. Paramount cast her in The Birds and the Bees (1956), playing the role originated by Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve (1941). Her third film for Paramount was The Joker Is Wild (1957), a biopic of Joe E. Lewis starring Frank Sinatra, in which Gaynor played the female lead. In 1957, Gaynor appeared in MGM's Les Girls, directed by George Cukor, with Gene Kelly and Kay Kendall.
