To all dancers, dance enthusiasts and tap dancers, join us in celebrating the Birthday of Marilyn Miller today 09/01/1898. Miller was born Mary Ellen Reynolds in Evansville, Indiana
Marilyn was one of the most popular Broadway musical stars of the 1920s and early 1930s. She was an accomplished tap dancer, singer and actress. On stage she usually played rags-to-riches Cinderella characters who lived happily ever after. Miller’s enormous popularity and famed image were in distinct contrast to her personal life, which was marred by disappointment, tragedy, frequent illness, and ultimately her sudden death due to complications of nasal surgery at age 37.
Marilyn was only four years old when, as Mademoiselle Sugarlump she debuted at Lakeside Park in Dayton, Ohio. With her family’s Vaudeville act they toured the Midwest and Europe in Variety for ten years, skirting the child labor authorities, before Lee Shubert discovered Marilyn at the Lotus Club in London in 1914.
Florenz Ziegfeld made her a star after she performed in his Ziegfeld Follies of 1918, at the famed New Amsterdam Theatre on 42nd Street, with music by Irving Berlin. Sharing billing with Eddie Cantor, Will Rogers and W.C. Fields, she brought the house down with her impersonation of Ziegfeld’s wife, Billie Burke, in a number entitled Mine Was a Marriage of Convenience.
She followed as a headliner in the Follies of 1919, dancing to Berlin’s Mandy, Miller attained legendary status in the Ziegfeld production Sally 1920 with music by Jerome Kern, especially for her performance of Kern’s Look for the Silver Lining. The musical, about a dishwasher who joins the Follies and marries a millionaire, it ran 570 performances at the New Amsterdam.
After a rift with Ziegfeld, she signed with rival producer Charles Dillingham and starred as Peter Pan in a 1924 Broadway revival, then as a circus queen in Sunny 1925, with music by Kern and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein. A box-office smash, it featured the classic Who?, and made her the highest paid star on Broadway. In 1928, after reuniting with Ziegfeld, she starred in his production of the successful George Gershwin musical Rosalie followed by Smiles 1930 with Fred Astaire.
Miller’s film credits Sally 1929 – Sunny 1930 and Her Majesty Love 1931 with W.C. Fields – Smiles 1937.
Her last Broadway show, marking a major comeback, was the innovative 1933-34 Irving Berlin/Moss Hart musical, As Thousands Cheer, in which she appeared in the production number Easter Parade.
Filmography
* Sally (1929)
* Sunny (1930)
* Her Majesty Love (1931)