Debra Paget

At 90 years old, Debra Paget has this physical status:

Debra Paget (born Debralee Griffin; August 19, 1933) is an American actress and entertainer.

She is perhaps best known for her performances in Cecil B. DeMille's epic The Ten Commandments (1956) and in Love Me Tender (1956) (the film debut of Elvis Presley), and for the risque (for the time) snake dance scene in The Indian Tomb (1959).

Early life

Paget was born in Denver, Colorado, one of five children born to Margaret Allen (née Gibson), a former actress (one source says, "ex-burlesque queen"), and Frank Henry Griffin, a painter. The family moved from Denver to Los Angeles, California, in the 1930s to be close to the developing film industry. Paget was enrolled in the Hollywood Professional School when she was 11. Margaret was determined that Debra and her siblings would also make their careers in show business. Three of Paget's siblings, Marcia (Teala Loring), Leslie (Lisa Gaye), and Frank (Ruell Shayne), entered show business.

Paget had her first professional job at age 8, and acquired some stage experience at 13 when she acted in a 1946 production of Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Personal life

During production of Love Me Tender (1956), Elvis Presley became smitten with Paget, who in 1997 said that he had proposed marriage. At the time, however, the media reported that she was romantically linked with Howard Hughes and nothing came of this infatuation. A 1956 article quoted Paget's comments about Hughes:

Paget married actor and singer David Street on January 14, 1958, but she obtained a divorce on April 11, 1958.

On March 27, 1960, she married Budd Boetticher, a director, in Tijuana, Mexico. They separated after 22 days, and their divorce became official in 1961.

Paget left the entertainment industry in 1964 after marrying Ling C. Kung (孔令傑) on April 19, 1962. Kung was a Chinese-American oil industry executive. His parents were banker and politician H. H. Kung and businesswoman Soong Ai-ling. Through his father, he was a descendant of Confucius. His maternal aunts were Soong Mei-ling, wife of Chiang Kai-shek and First Lady of the Republic of China, and political figure Soong Ching-ling. Paget and Kung had one son, Gregory Teh-chi Kung. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1980.

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Career

Paget's first film role was as Teena Riconti, the girlfriend of Richard Conte's character in Cry of the City, a 1948 film noir directed by Robert Siodmak for twentieth-century Fox.

Fox loved her and agreed to a long-term deal. She appeared in Mother Is a Freshman (1949) and House of Strangers (1949).

James Stewart's first vehicle for Fox was the popular Broken Arrow. Paget played Sonseehray ("morningstar"), a Native American maiden who falls in love with Stewart's story at the age of 16. Stewart was 42 at the time, and he was 42.

She appeared in six original radio plays for Family Theater from 1950 to 1956. She appeared in four episodes of Lux Radio Theater, including Burt Lancaster, Tyrone Power, Cesar Romero, Ronald Colman, and Robert Stack. Dramatizations of two of her feature films were included in the latter collection.

Paget appeared in Fourteen Hours (1951), was reunited with Broken Arrow producer Delmer Daves and actor Jeff Chandler in Bird of Paradise (1951), playing a role similar to Broken Arrow.

Paget was Anne of the Indies' second female leader (1951). In Les Misérables (1952), she was third billed in Belles on Their Toes (1952), playing Cosette.

Robert Wagner's love affair in Stars and Stripes Forever (1952) and Prince Valiant (1954) was the subject of a lot of speculation. Sheena, the Jungle's actress, appeared alongside Anita Ekberg and Irish McCalla, among others, in 1953, wearing a blonde wig.

With the swashbuckler Princess of the Nile (1954), co-starring Jeffrey Hunter, Fox finally gave Paget the highest billing. The film was not a huge hit at the box office. However, the fan mail Paget received at 20th Century-Fox was only topped by that for Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable in the year since Princess of the Nile was announced.

Paget was a major commercial success in Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954). She was Dale Robertson's love affair in The Gambler from Natchez (1954) and portrayed another Native American in White Feather (1955), playing the sister of Jeffrey Hunter's character and Robert Wagner's lover.

In Seven Angry Men (1955), Fox loaned Paget and Hunter to Allied Artists. Anne Bancroft was injured during filming The Last Hunt (1956), MGM's studio hired Paget to play Anne Bancroft, another Native American.

In Cecil B. DeMille's biblical epic The Ten Commandments (1956), Paramount Pictures borrowed Lilia, the water girl, from 20th Century Fox for the role of Lilia, the water girl. To mask her blue eyes, she had to wear brown contact lenses; "If it hadn't been for the lenses, she wouldn't have gotten the part." However, she also said that the lenses were "awful to work in" because the klieg lights heat[ed] them up.

The film was a huge success, as was Paget's Fox western, Love Me Tender (1956) with Elvis Presley; Paget and Richard Egan were billed above Presley; but it was the singer's fame and charisma that made it so popular.

The River's Edge (1957) was her last film she made for Fox.

Paget's career began to decline after that time. In Omar Khayyam (1957), she went to Paragua to play Cornel Wilde's love affair. In From the Earth to the Moon (1958), she was the youth lead. Paget, a talented dancer and singer, also performed at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, showcasing a good nightclub performance.

She travelled to Germany in 1958 to headline Fritz Lang's two-film adventure tale The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb (1959), a role that recalled her appearance in Princess of the Nile.

Paget appeared in "The Unwilling" of the NBC Western television series Riverboat, starring Darren McGavin in 1959. Despite a raid by pirates stealing $20,000 worth of merchandise, Dan Simpson, played by Eddie Albert, tries to open a general store. Russell Johnson appears in this episode as Darius. In 1959, she appeared as a Mexican revolutionary in an episode of Wagon Train.

Laura Ashley appeared in the CBS's Western series "Incident of the Garden of Eden" in 1960. Agnes St. John, the only living witness to a brutal stagecoach robbery in another CBS Western, Johnny Ringo, starring Don Durant in the title role, was the same year. In 1962, she and James Coburn appeared in Azuela in the episode "Hostage Child" in which she appeared alongside Azuela.

Why Must I Die? Paget appeared in Cleopatra's Daughter (1960) shot in Italy. (1960) for American International Pictures, Most Dangerous Man Alive (1961), and Rome 1585 (1961) again in Italy.

Roger Corman's two films, Tales of Terror (1963) and The Haunted Palace (1963), were two of her last two films.

She did television work throughout her career. Gene Barry appeared in a December 1965 episode of ABC's Burke's Law, her last appearance in this medium. She resigned from entertainment in 1965 after marrying a wealthy oil executive by whom she had one son, her only child.

Paget became a born-again Christian. An Interlude with Debra Paget, a Christian network, was host on the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), a Christian network in the early 1990s, and she was also involved in Praise the Lord. She appears on TBN occasionally as a visitor.

The Motion Picture and Television Fund awarded Paget with the Golden Boot Award in 1987, which is given to those actors, writers, producers, and stunt crews who "have so much to the growth and preservation of the western tradition in film and television."

In his 2016 documentary essay, Debra Paget, For Example, independent filmmaker Mark Rappaport paid tribute to her.

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