Debbie Reynolds dies age 84, the day after her daughter Carrie Fisher

Actor Debbie Reynolds has died age 84, the day after the death of Carrie Fisher, Reynolds’ daughter with singer Eddie Fisher.

Reynolds suffered a severe stroke, reportedly 15 minutes after telling her son Todd Fisher that “she was very, very sad about losing Carrie and that she would like to be with her again”.

Born in El Paso, Texas, in 1932, Reynolds shot to fame at the age of 19 opposite Gene Kelly in the classic Singin’ in the Rain (1952). Often considered the greatest of all movie musicals, the film has Reynolds playing a young ingénue, Kathy Selden, who gets her break in the movies at the beginning of the sound era when she is called upon the dub the voice of a silent film star.

Her subsequent films include Susan Slept Here (1954), Bundle of Joy (1956) and Tammy and the Bachelor (1957), the latter famous for her rendition of the song ‘Tammy’. She later garnered an Oscar nomination for best actress for The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964), playing the famously redoubtable Margaret Brown, who survived the sinking of the Titanic.

More recently, she played Grace Adler’s showbiz mum in the hit TV series Will & Grace from 1999 to 2006, earning herself an Emmy award. Later films include Albert Brooks’ Mother (1996), opposite Brooks himself, and the romantic comedy In & Out (1997), starring alongside Kevin Kline and Joan Cusack.

She died on 28 December 2016 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre in Los Angeles.

Lip synching played a pivotal part in the career of Debbie Reynolds, who has died at the age of 84, just a day after her daughter, Carrie Fisher. While competing in the 1948 Miss Burbank beauty pageant, Reynolds mimed along to Betty Hutton’s recording of ‘I’m a Square in the Social Circle’ and was spotted by a Warner Bros talent scout. Studio boss Jack Warner changed her name from Marie Frances to Debbie for her debut in June Bride (1948). But it was only when MGM signed her that Reynolds began to flourish, even though she again sang along to Helen Kane’s rendition of ‘I Wanna Be Loved by You’ in Three Little Words (1950).

There was a nice irony, therefore, in the fact that the 19-year-old was cast in Singin’ in the Rain (1952) as a starlet who dubs the dialogue for silent siren Jean Hagen, whose voice isn’t suitable for the talkies. Yet co-directors Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen weren’t convinced by Reynolds’s delivery and Hagen wound up providing her own dubbed voice, while Betty Noyce doubled for Reynolds on ‘Would You’.

Kelly proved a hard taskmaster, and legend has it that Fred Astaire gave Reynolds private dancing lessons during the shoot. They reteamed on The Pleasure of His Company (1961), by which time she had also co-starred with Dick Powell in Susan Slept Here (1954), Frank Sinatra in The Tender Trap (1955), Bette Davis in The Catered Affair (1956), Bing Crosby in Say One for Me and Glenn Ford in It Started with a Kiss (both 1959). ‘The New First Lady of Hollywood’ had also been paired with Donald O’Connor in I Love Melvin (1953) and crooner husband Eddie Fisher in Bundle of Joy (1956) and had scored million-selling singles with ‘Aba Daba Honeymoon’ from Two Weeks with Love (1950) and ‘Tammy’ from Tammy and the Bachelor (1957).

After Fisher abandoned Reynolds for Elizabeth Taylor, however, she came to resent the brand of wholesome peppiness that MGM had imposed upon her and she tried to establish herself as a serious actress with The Rat Race (1960) and How the West Was Won (1962). Yet her sole Oscar nomination came when Shirley MacLaine dropped out of The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964) and Reynolds sparkled as the onetime saloon singer who survives the Titanic disaster. It proved something of a last hurrah, however, as flirtations with the sex comedy (Divorce American Style, 1967) and horror (What’s the Matter with Helen?, 1971) misfired. As did her favourite picture, The Singing Nun (1966), and a TV series that was cancelled during its first season.

Undaunted (even after she discovered that her second husband had gambled her into debt), Reynolds threw herself into cabaret and stage work. She also devoted herself to the Thalians mental health charity and to preserving iconic movie costumes, while contributing voices to Charlotte’s Web (1973), Kiki’s Delivery Service (1998) and Rugrats in Paris (2000) and taking scene-stealing character roles in Mother (1996), In & Out (1997) and Behind the Candelabra (2013). She also made exercise videos and flourished in small-screen guest spots on Halloweentown (1998-2006) and Will & Grace (1999), for which she landed an Emmy nomination.

Over the years, Reynolds and Fisher (who had found fame as Princess Leia in Star Wars, 1977) endured a sometimes stormy relationship, although the former always denied the factual basis of the latter’s novel, Postcards from the Edge, which was filmed with Shirley MacLaine and Meryl Streep in 1987. But there seems little doubt that the loss of her daughter caused the stroke that killed her. As her son Todd declared: “She wanted to be with Carrie.”