By Lynn Elber / The Associated Press
Actress Debbie Reynolds, the star of the 1952 classic movie Singin’ in the Rain, has died one day after the death of her daughter, actress-writer Carrie Fisher. Reynolds was 84.
Her son, Todd Fisher, said Reynolds died on Wednesday.
“She’s now with Carrie, and we’re all heartbroken,” Fisher said from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where his mother was taken by ambulance earlier Wednesday.
He said the stress of his sister’s death on Tuesday “was too much” for Reynolds. Carrie Fisher, who was 60, had been hospitalized since Friday.
“She said, ‘I want to be with Carrie,’” her son said. “And then she was gone.”
Reynolds enjoyed the very heights of show-business success and endured the depths of personal tragedy and betrayal. She lost one husband to Elizabeth Taylor and two other husbands plundered her for millions. Fisher, who found lasting fame as Princess Leia in Star Wars and struggled for much of her life with drug addiction and mental-health problems, died after falling ill on a plane and being hospitalized.
Reynolds was a superstar early in life. After two minor roles at Warner Bros. and three supporting roles at MGM, studio boss Louis B. Mayer cast her in Singin’ in the Rain, despite Kelly’s objections. She was 19 with little dance experience, and she would be appearing with two of the screen’s greatest dancers, Donald O’Connor and Kelly, who also codirected.
“Gene Kelly was hard on me, but I think he had to be,” Reynolds, who, more than held her own in the movie, said in a 1999 Associated Press interview. “I had to learn everything in three to six months. Donald O’Connor had been dancing since he was three months old, Gene Kelly since he was 2 years old…. I think, Gene knew I had to be challenged.”
After her transition from starlet to star, Reynolds became immensely popular with teenage girls and even more so when in 1955 she married Eddie Fisher, the pop singer whose fans were equally devoted.
The couple made a movie together, Bundle of Joy, which seemed to mirror the 1956 birth of Carrie. The Fishers also had a son, Todd, named for Eddie’s close friend and Taylor’s husband, showman Mike Todd.
During this period, Reynolds had a No. 1 hit on the pop charts in 1957 with “Tammy,” the Oscar-nominated song from her film Tammy and the Bachelor. But the Cinderella story ended after Mike Todd died in a 1958 airplane crash. Fisher consoled the widow and soon announced he was leaving his wife and two children to marry Taylor.
The celebrity world seemed to lose its mind. Taylor was assailed as a husband-stealer, Fisher as a deserter of his family. Fisher’s singing career never recovered, but Taylor, who left him for Richard Burton in 1962, remained a top star, and Reynolds’s film career flourished.
But over the years, Reynolds’s marital woes continued. Her two other marriages—to shoe magnate Harry Karl and businessman Richard Hamlett—left her deep in debt, a hole of bankruptcy from which she climbed out of through tireless hard work.
“All of my husbands have robbed me blind,” she asserted in 1999. “The only one who didn’t take money was Eddie Fisher. He just didn’t pay for the children.”
In her later years, Reynolds continued performing her show, traveling 40 weeks a year. She also appeared regularly on television, appearing as John Goodman’s mother on Roseanne and a mom on Will & Grace. Her books included the memoirs Unsinkable and Make ’Em Laugh.
Reynolds and Taylor, who worked together in the 2001 TV-movie comedy These Old Broads, reconciled years before Taylor died in 2011; Reynolds recalled they had both been passengers on the Queen Elizabeth.
“I sent a note to her and she sent a note to me in passing, and then we had dinner together,” she told The Huffington Post a few months after Taylor’s death. “She was married to Richard Burton by then. I had been remarried at that point. And we just said, ‘Let’s call it a day.’ And we got smashed. And we had a great evening, and stayed friends since then.”
Image credits: AP