[Deathwatch] Irene Manning, actress, 91

[Deathwatch Central <cdw@slick.org>]

THanks to a few readers for sending this one - Ed.

Irene Manning, star of '40s musicals, dies

SAN CARLOS, Calif. (AP) ? Irene Manning, the beautiful, classically
trained singer who appeared in some of the biggest musicals of the
1940s, including Yankee Doodle Dandy, Shine on Harvest Moon and The
Desert Song, has died of congestive heart failure. She was 91.

Manning died May 28 at home, said her stepdaughter, Peggy Shafer.

She made her film debut in 1938, under the name Hope Manning, appearing
opposite singing cowboy Gene Autry in the 1938 horse opera The Old
Corral.

Two more films for Republic Pictures followed, along with leading roles
with the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera, before she signed a contract
with Warner Bros.

It was at Warner's, in a relatively minor role, that Manning likely
gained her most lasting fame in 1942's Yankee Doodle Dandy. Opposite
James Cagney's legendary song-and-dance man George Cohan, Manning
played real-life Broadway star Fay Templeton. She sang 'Mary's a Grand
Old Name,' 'So Long Mary' and '45 Minutes From Broadway.'

The following year she starred opposite Dennis Morgan in The Desert
Song, and she appeared in Shine On, Harvest Moon, with Morgan and Ann
Sheridan in 1944.

"From the time I was a little girl, I loved to sing," she told the
movie publication Classic Images last year. "I was always singing. In
fact, I was found singing in my sleep when I was two. Our next-door
neighbours heard me and told my mother. They went upstairs and I was
singing The Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia in my sleep."

Other film credits included Hollywood Canteen, The Doughgirls, Escape
in the Desert, I Live in Grosvenor Square and The Big Shot.

Born Inez Harvuot in Cincinnati, Manning moved with her family to Los
Angeles when she was 10 and later studied voice at the Eastman School
of Music in Rochester, N.Y.

She toured the United States and England with her own four-woman USO
and recorded with Glenn Miller's Army Air Forces Band during the Second
World War.

When her movie career faded after the war, she moved on to the stage,
appearing on Broadway, the London stage and in civic light opera
productions. She also had her own BBC television show, An American in
England, in 1951.

Back in the United States, she appeared in nightclubs and on
television's Playhouse 90 before retiring in the mid-1960s. She came
out of retirement in the 1970s to appear in a number of musicals in San
Francisco Bay area theatres.

Married four times, the last of her husbands was Maxwell Hunter, who
helped design Nike, Thor and other missiles during the Cold War. They
were married 37 years until his death in 2001.