Want to know the best Deanna Durbin movies? How about the worst Deanna Durbin movies? Curious about Deanna Durbin box office grosses or which Deanna Durbin movie picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Deanna Durbin movie got the best reviews from critics and audiences? Well you have come to the right place….because we have all of that information.
Deanna Durbin (1921-2013) was a Canadian actress and singer, who appeared in Universal Pictures musical films in the 1930s and 1940s. The early box office success of her movies were widely credited with keeping Universal out of bankruptcy. Deanna Durbin’s IMDb page shows 23 acting credits from 1936-1948. This page will rank 21 Deanna Durbin movies from Best to Worst in six different sortable columns of information. Two of her short films were not included in the rankings.
Drivel part of the page: This Deanna Durbin page was requested by Robert Roy. I have to admit before starting this website in 2011….I was completely unaware of Deanna Durbin. However in my movie research over the last five plus years I have run into name numerous times. It is only after putting together this page that I realize that her career…was very very impressive. That being said…Deanna Durbin joins Mary Pickford as the only UMR subject that I have not seen a single movie that they appeared in.
Deanna Durbin Movies Ranked In Chronological Order With Ultimate Movie Rankings Score (1 to 5 UMR Tickets) *Best combo of box office, reviews and awards.
Deanna Durbin Movies Can Be Ranked 6 Ways In This Table
The really cool thing about this table is that it is “user-sortable”. Rank the movies any way you want.
- Sort Deanna Durbin movies by her co-stars
- Sort Deanna Durbin movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
- Sort Deanna Durbin movies by yearly domestic box office rank
- Sort Deanna Durbin movies by how they were received by critics and audiences. 60% rating or higher should indicate a good movie.
- Sort by how many Oscar® nominations and how many Oscar® wins each Deanna Durbin movie received.
- Sort Deanna Durbin movies by Ultimate Movie Rankings (UMR) Score. UMR puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.
Stats and Possibly Interesting Things from the Above Deanna Durbin Table
- Eleven Deanna Durbin movies crossed the magical $100 million domestic gross mark. That is a percentage of 52.38% of her movies listed. One Hundred Men and a Girl (1937) was her biggest box office hit.
- An average Deanna Durbin movie grosses $128.30 million in adjusted box office gross.
- Using RottenTomatoes.com’s 60% fresh meter. 18 of Deanna Durbin’s movies are rated as good movies…or 85.71% of her movies. It Started With Eve (1941) is her highest rated movie while I’ll Be Yours (1947) is her lowest rated movie.
- Twelve Deanna Durbin movies received at least one Oscar® nomination in any category…. or 57.14% of her movies.
- One Deanna Durbin movie won at least one Oscar® in any category….or 4.76% of her movies.
- An average Ultimate Movie Ranking (UMR) Score is 60.00. 19 Deanna Durbin movie scored higher than average…. or 90.47% of her movies. One Hundred Men and a Girl (1937) got the the highest UMR Score while Up In Central Park (1948) got the lowest UMR Score.
Possibly Interesting Facts About Deanna Durbin
1. Edna Mae Durbin was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada in 1921. Universal changed her professional name to Deanna when she signed a contract with them. She however remained Edna Mae in her personal life.
2. Deanna Durbin was in the running to play the voice of Snow White in 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs but Walt Disney himself rejected her, claiming she sounded “too mature.” She was 14 at the time.
3. In 1936 Deanna Durbin appeared in the short film, Every Sunday. Also in that cast was a very young Judy Garland.
4. In 1939 Deanna Durbin and Mickey Rooney shared a Juvenile Oscar®: For their significant contribution in bringing to the screen the spirit and personification of youth, and as juvenile players setting a high standard of ability and achievement.
5. Deanna Durbin’s first 6 movies all received an Oscar® nomination (all categories). That is probably a record…. the closest that I can think of would-be John Cazele whose first and only 5 movies got an Oscar® nomination.
6. Deanna Durbin was the number one female star in England from 1939 to 1942.
7. Deanna Durbin was Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Anne Frank’s favorite movie star. Churchill reportedly insisted that he be permitted to screen her films privately before they were released to the public in Britain and would often screen her film 1937’s One Hundred Men and a Girl to celebrate British victories during World War II.
8. Deanna Durbin has been married three times. She had two children.
9. In 1948, Deanna Durbin, retired from movies at the age of 27. Despite numerous offers she never appeared in another movie over the last 65 years of her life.
10. Reports that Deanna Durbin had died a horrible death (variously reported as during childbirth, tuberculosis, a car accident, etc.) were among the most widely circulated pieces of propaganda by the Axis Powers during World War II as a means of demoralizing Allied troops and Prisoners of War. There’s a TIME magazine article from 1944/45 in which its’ stated that one of the first questions asked by liberated POWs was whether Deanna was still alive. – Thanks to Mark for this.
Check out Deanna Durbin’s career compared to current and classic actors. Most 100 million Dollar Movies of All-Time.
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Any thoughts Bob? You are by far the biggest Deanna fan I know. A quick check on wiki does not even list “family”.
HI BRUCE
The 3.26 post AM yesterday is actually from me in which I set out my thoughts about Deanna’s family situation. I forgot to put my name in the flagg-up – apologies.
My own 2 grandchildren aged 14 and 16 years of age are off-school now for the holidays and yesterday I watched Eastwood’s Sudden Impact with the grandson. It was one of Clint’s Dirty Harry series and I remember watching it when it first came out in 1983 – where oh where have all those years gone?
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I hope you are enjoying your own break, are taking a REAL rest, and not substituting the classroom with other academic sidelines. When I lived with my parents we had a next door neighbour who was a workaholic and he had a Belfast shipyard job by day; in the evenings he tended bar in a drinking club up until midnight; upon which he travelled across town to a nightclub where he was employed as a steward.
When talking to my father over the hedge he said once “Must get this cutting finished quickly Harry – there are not enough hours in the day for me.”
Every time he went on his annual holidays by sea he worked his passage over by tending bar aboard the ship until he got to the holiday resort. That would be YOU! Anuway take care and give my regards to your own loved-ones.
I also have wondered about that so if anyone who follows this site does know the answer I too would be grateful to learn it .
However after her retirement she appears to have had an obsession with keeping her personal life very private; and in that respect she would seem to have had considerable cooperation from the general media, publicists and the gossip columnists For example:
1/Whilst at 91 she obviously died generally of old-age the precise details of her death seem to have been kept secret; and Peter David her son put out a statement indicating that he wanted the absence of publicity over the finer details of the death kept that way. Apparently her death certificate registers her as Edna M David.
2/A few years ago I spotted on Wikipedia information about a certain aspect of her love-life in her Hollywood days that (especially in relation to her screen image) would have been controversial when her career was active.
When a few weeks later I sought to check it out again for a private article I was doing about her it had been withdrawn; though other facts that I am aware of clearly indicate that the seemingly ‘airbrushed-out’ information had been accurate.
I should add that today the matter concerned would have cut no ice and would not have affected her career and in no way would it have tarnished her legacy as a highly-respectable young woman.
I should add too that as I understand it that when in 1950 she agreed to marry French director Charles David and go to live with him on his family farm in Paris France one of her conditions was that they would conduct their lives together in total privacy. Obviously that pact was religiously maintained.
[Presumably they didn’t want authors like Bruce Cogerson and Joel Hirschhorn stalking Deanna for books they were writing!!; though she did grant one interview in 1983 to the great films author and movie historian David Shipman who had written acclaimed profiles of Olivier, Brando, Hitchcock and Chaplin in a series called The Movie Makers.]
This seems to be an active discussion group about Deanna Durbin. Maybe someone out there can answer this simple question, of which I have been curious. Does she have any grandchildren or great-grandchildren? (Did Jessica or Peter have any kids?) Everywhere I’ve looked online or in books, I can’t find an answer either yes or no.