Helen Kane

Helen Kane ( * as Helen Clare Schroeder, August 4, 1903 in the Bronx, † September 26, 1966 in Queens ) was an American actress and singer. She was especially known for the song I Wanna Be Loved by You.

Life and career

Kane was the daughter of German - Irish immigrants and entered the age of 15 years on the stage, with the Marx Brothers in On the Balcony. In the 1920s, she toured in vaudeville as a singer and dancer, among other things, an All Jazz Revue. 1921 began its Broadway engagement. Among other things, she sang with the vocal trio Three X Sisters (formerly Hamilton Sisters and Fordyce - she was roommate of Jessie Fordyce from the trio ). Her breakthrough came in 1927 with the musical A Night in Spain on Broadway. The song That's My Weakness Now, she sang theater in Times Square Paramount, 1928 was a hit for them. Since they interpolated the scat singing boop boop -a- doop - a refrain that as a nickname depend remained at her ( Boop boop -a- doop - Girl, a title of their EP MGM 1954).

In the same year 1928, she had her biggest success in Good Boy by Oscar Hammerstein with the song I Wanna Be Loved By You by Harry Ruby and Bert Kalmar. She received top salaries and was the end of the 1920s, a cult figure. A certain external similarity suggested a model for the cartoon character Betty Boop the Fleischer Studios - it was relatively small and plump with curly black hair, round face and big brown eyes. Her voice was a young girl - pitch with a mixture of coquetry and apparent naivety to slight Bronx accent. Against the similarity with the cartoon, she moved in 1932 to court against Fleischer and Paramount ( the Betty Boop common in so-called Talkartoons ), but lost in the end. The defendants were able to demonstrate in court that another singer used the phrase Boop - boop -a- doop before. Helen Kane saw in the comic figure, a source of unfair competition by it in their own film studio use in the Novelty Numbers for which it was known, accepted.

Her clear diction and good timing when singing she had from the stage experience in vaudeville. Besides Scat they also used the then fashionable in Berlin during the Weimar Republic chant. The late 1920s and early 1930s, she also starred in several films by Paramount Pictures. Among other things, the college musical Sweetie ( 1929), with hits such as The Prep Step and He's so unusual. A major role was in Dangerous Nan McGrew 1930 (produced by Mack Sennett ), in which she played an entertainer in a traveling medicine show. Another film was the movie musical Pointed Heels ( 1929) with William Powell and Fay Wray.

Their time was the beginning of the Great Depression start over the 1930s. She still had occasional appearances, as on the Ed Sullivan show on television until the 1960s.

She was married three times, his first wife, from 1924 to the department store owner Joseph Kane, who was terminated effective after one year, in a second marriage even shorter with the actor Max Hoffman (1932 /33). Since 1939, she was married to Dan Healy, with whom she had a restaurant in New York. In 1956 she got breast cancer, which she fought the next ten years (with many irradiations ) ultimately futile. The marriages were childless.

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