Dan Dailey products
Born in New York City, Dan Dailey started his career in vaudeville, later making his Broadway debut in the stage version of "Babes in Arms".
When signed to MGM, the studio initially casted him as a Nazi in The Mortal Storm (1940). The studio realized their mistake and cast him in musical films thereafter. Then, after serving in World War II, Dailey later returned to acting to make more musicals.
A child performer, by the early 1950s Dan Dailey's life was under considerable strain. In 1951 he checked himself into the Menninger Clinic for five months and, after his return to Hollywood presented his experiences there frankly to Hedda Hopper and other reporters, pointing out that the necessity of this break from his hectic show business career was prompted by his "cracking up" over a period of time. During this period of excessive strain, he was performing in the serio-comic "I Can Get It For You Wholesale" at 20th Century Fox. Director Michael Gordon, in an interview with film scholar Ronald Davis in "Just Making Movies" said that he had found him "enormously gratifying" to work with and was later surprised to learn that Dailey later admitted that "he didn't even remember doing some of the scenes...Yet he worked hard on the picture and gave a fine dramatic performance."
The performer later explained that "Work, any amount of it,even too much work is all right if the rest of your life O.K. But when work is the only thing you have, when you bury yourself in it 24 hours a day -- well, that's dangerous." The actor-dancer's unusual candor in Hollywood may have made it easier for him to continue his career, which ended in 1978 after his unexpected death following a hip replacement. Unfortunately, psychological problems may have contributed to the suicide in 1975 of his only child Dan Dailey, Jr.
| Gwen Carter | (5 February 1955 - 1961) (divorced) |
| Elizabeth Hofert | (1942 - 27 May 1951) (divorced) 1 child |
| Esther Rodier | (? - 1941) (divorced) |
| Carole Warner | (? - ?) (divorced) |
His only child, Dan Dailey III, committed suicide in 1975
Brother of actress Irene Dailey
Interred at Forest Lawn (Glendale), Glendale, California, USA, in the Court of Freedom, lot #7065.
In Hollywood, after you get a little success, the next thing you usually get is a divorce.
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