Sandra Dee
by Andre Soares
Actress Sandra Dee died today of complications from kidney disease at the Los Robles Hospital & Medical Center in the Los Angeles suburb of Thousand Oaks. She was 63.
Born Alexandra Zuck on April 23, 1942 (several sources have 1944), in Bayonne, New Jersey, Dee started modeling while in grade school. By the age of 12, she had become a successful Conover model.
After appearing in TV shows and commercials, Dee was discovered by Universal producer Ross Hunter. Hunter had reportedly been looking for a newcomer after balking at paying Warner Bros. $200,000 to borrow Natalie Wood for the role of Lana Turner’s willful daughter in Imitation of Life (1959). (In addition to this gaudy sudser, Dee — who became a Universal contract player — would appear in eight other Ross Hunter productions.)
Before Imitation of Life was released, the pretty, full-faced Dee could be seen on the big screen in MGM’s Until They Sail (1957), supporting Paul Newman and Jean Simmons, and The Reluctant Débutante (1958), a "prestige" — if vapid — production directed by Vincente Minnelli, and in which Dee played opposite Rex Harrison, Kay Kendall, and John Saxon.
Shortly thereafter, Dee hit teen superstardom with the Columbia release Gidget (1959), in the title role as the bubbly beach-going adolescent who, poor thing, must not only learn to surf but also decide between Cliff Robertson and James Darren.
Universal then used Dee’s skyrocketing popularity to propel their Tammy franchise, which had started with Debbie Reynolds singing in the bayous in 1957. Thus, Dee was cast in Tammy Tell Me True (1961) and Tammy and the Doctor (1963), neither of which made film history.
Other Dee films of the period include the blockbuster soap opera A Summer Place (1959), as hunky Troy Donahue’s girl; the Peter Ustinov-directed Cold War comedy Romanoff and Juliet (1961); and the murder-melo Portrait in Black (1960), once again as Lana Turner’s daughter.
In 1960, Dee married pop singer Bobby Darin after a one-month courtship. They had been cast as juveniles in the Rock Hudson-Gina Lollobrigida vehicle Come September (1961), which was quite successful.
However, two Dee-Darin follow-ups, If a Man Answers (1962) and That Funny Feeling (1965), were disappointments. As a result of Dee’s rapidly fading box-office allure, Universal let her go after the 1966 thriller A Man Could Get Killed.
"I thought they were my friends," she told the Associated Press. "But I found out on the last picture that I was simply a piece of property to them. I begged them not to make me do the picture, but they insisted."
In 1967, Dee and Darin were divorced. (He died in 1973 at age 37, following open-heart surgery.)
After Ross Hunter’s lighthearted Rosie! (1967) with Rosalind Russell, Dee dropped out of sight. In the following decades, she made only sporadic appearances in mostly TV films (including the 1977 Fantasy Island feature), and did some stage work. In 1978, her name was brought back to the limelight via the song "Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee" from the dreary — but highly successful — musical Grease.
In a March 1991 interview with People magazine, Dee stated that her stepfather sexually abused her as a child. The former actress was then recovering from a serious alcohol problem. "I couldn’t function," she told People, adding that she had been drinking more than a quart of scotch every day. She credited her (only) son with Darin for her psychological recovery. According to a friend, Dee had been on dialysis for approximately four years.
In 2004, Kate Bosworth played Dee in Kevin Spacey’s Beyond the Sea, the Bobby Darin biopic that offered 45-year-old Spacey as the twenty- and thirty-something Darin. The film underwhelmed most critics and was received coolly at the box office.
Although Sandra Dee could never have been accused of being a great actress, she was a likable screen presence. At the height of her popularity (1960-61), U.S. exhibitors voted her one of the top-ten box-office stars in the country.
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