With her blonde bob, melting brown eyes and chirping voice, Sandra Dee was the personification of winsome youth in the 1950s and early '60s. Born Alexandra Zuck in Bayonne, N.J., on April 23, 1942, she became a successful model while still in grade school and entered films before her 15th birthday.

Dee made her film debut in MGM's Until They Sail (1957), a romantic World War II drama set in New Zealand, as one of a group of unlikely sisters that also included Jean Simmons, Joan Fontaine and Piper Laurie. Another example of improbable lineage at MGM has Dee as the daughter of Rex Harrison in The Reluctant Debutante (1958), a comedy of manners in which she attracted favorable notice despite the presence of such formidable costars as Kay Kendall and Angela Lansbury.

Moving to Universal-International, Dee was believably cast as Lana Turner's blonde, precociously sophisticated daughter in Imitation of Life (1959), Douglas Sirk's remake of the tear-jerking melodrama about a black housekeeper (Juanita Moore) whose daughter (Susan Kohner) passes for white. Dee then became a full-fledged teen star as Gidget (1959), a perky surfer whose nickname stands for "girl midget." She reinforced her standing with teen audiences with her tremulous performance as an innocent girl who shares a beach romance with Troy Donahue in Warner Bros. A Summer Place (1959).

Then it was back to Universal for more melodrama with Lana Turner in Portrait in Black (1960), in which Dee plays suspicious stepdaughter to Turner's murderous wife. From 1960-1967 Dee was married to singing idol Bobby Darin, her costar in the romantic comedies Come September (1961), If a Man Answers (1962) and That Funny Feeling (1965). Dee again played adorable daughters in Romanoff and Juliet (1961) and Take Her, She's Mine (1963) and took over Debbie Reynolds' role in two "Tammy" sequels, Tammy Tell Me True (1961) and Tammy and the Doctor (1963).

Her divorce from Darin seemed to tarnish Dee's image as innocent ingénue, a prototype that was becoming outdated anyway in the late 1960s and '70s, as satirized in the musical Grease with the song lyric "Look at me, I'm Sandra Dee, lousy with virginity." Dee's screen opportunities dwindled; she made intermittent television appearances in the 1970s and appeared in her final feature film, Lost, in 1983. A wistful figure in her final years, she died of kidney complications in February 2005.

by Roger Fristoe