(Vocal Jazz) Irene Dunne - Sings Kern and Other Rarities - 2011, MP3, 320 kbps

Irene Dunne was an established star on Broadway when she moved to Hollywood where she made a series of successful pictures including Cimarron (1931), for which she was nominated for the Oscar for Best Actress; Back Street (1932), and Magnificent Obsession (1935). She made a popular appearance in the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers film Roberta (1935), in which she sang the standard ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, and ‘Lovely to Look
At’, which cracked the Top 20.
Dunne reached a peak in 1936 when she played the role of Magnolia in the second (and perhaps definitive) film version of Show Boat. The same year, she agreed to appear in her first screen comedy role, in the film Theodora Goes Wild. In the event, she turned out to have a keen comic talent (she was nominated for the Oscar again), which led to a string of lighter roles, especially in a trio of films with Cary Grant: The Awful Truth (1937), My Favorite Wife (1940) and Penny Serenade (1941). The 1940s brought a wide variety of parts, notably Anna Leonowens in Anna and the King of Siam (1946), Lavinia Day in Life With Father (1947), Martha Hanson in I Remember Mama (1948) and Queen Victoria in The Mudlark (1950). But despite this formidable canon of screen appearances, Dunne never won an Oscar, and retired from the screen in 1952.
Apart from the delightful Jerome Kern songs contained here on this only solo CD featuring Irene Dunne, we have also included previously un-issued tracks from the vaults and alternate takes from the Great American Songbook making this a historically important release.