Jane Powell heartbreak after actress admitted unhappiness with career: ‘Never belonged’

Powell, who died aged 92 earlier this year, was a singing star at the famous Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) agency during the heyday of its musicals. From the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, she appeared in a range of films, many a success due to her coloratura soprano voice. She also starred in several glossy, gossamer entertainments, playing a love-sick teenager before graduating to adulthood at the age of 25 with her best role as Milly in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954).

The film, extremely popular in Britain, aired again this week on Channel 5, with viewers given the opportunity to be transported back to one of the most colourful on-screen musicals of the period.

While Powell was highly commended during her career, appearing in a slew of films and TV programmes, in later life, she admitted she was not all that comfortable in the world of Hollywood.

In 2002, she made one of her last appearances in front of the camera as a victimised Alzheimer’s patient during Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, the next year portraying Mama Mizner in the Stephen Sondheim musical Road Show (then called Bounce) that ran at the Kennedy Centre in Washington but failed to reach Broadway.

She retired soon afterwards and said — happily — that she never sang or danced again.

She said she disliked appearing at movie retrospectives, which she found an exploitative form of nostalgia, and rarely watched her old films, a reminder of a not entirely happy youth.

Speaking to the Geelong Advertiser, an Australian newspaper, in 2005, she admitted that she never felt she really “belonged” in film.

She said: “I was very shy. And very lonely.

“I really never felt I belonged.

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“And I couldn’t think of his name.”

Powell’s life was also marked by the number of highly public marriages and divorces she went through — five of the former, four of the latter.

She first married one time professional ice skater, Geary Steffen Jr, with whom she had two children, Gearhardt Anthony Steffen III and Suzanne Ilene Steffen.

But their marriage ended in divorce after her romance with Gene Nelson, her co-star in the 1953 musical, Three Sailors and a Girl.

Just a year after this, she went on to marry Patrick Nerney, with whom she had another child, Lindsey Averill Nerney.

The couple divorced in 1963 but it is unclear why.

In the next two years Powell married for a third time, tying the knot with journalist James Fitzgerald, who eventually became her business manager.

They parted ways in 1975.

Then, in 1978, she married writer David Parlous, but the pair divorced in 1981.

Powell later married Dickie Moore, her fifth husband, in 1988 and the pair stayed together until his death in 2015.

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is streaming on My5 until January 3, 2022.