Dinah Shore Biography

She attended Vanderbilt University, where she took voice lessons and sang on live radio shows. After graduating she moved to New York.

Shore initially encountered rejection in New York, where she was just another hopeful unknown. She earned notice after singing with another talented young amateur, Frank Sinatra, which brought her into Xavier Cugat's Orchestra. She soon won a contract with NBC as a staff singer.

This led to a record contract with RCA, just as America entered World Waw II. Shore made more than three hundred performance broadcasts on Armed Forces Radio, and was the first female performer to perform for American GI’s overseas.

By 1943 Shore had married actor George Montgomery. While Montgomery served in the Army, Ms. Shore released a string of hit records, including one of her signature songs, 'Dear Hearts and Gentle People', and launched her own radio show.

Ms. Shore and her husband pursued separate careers in film through the late 1940s, but Shore was difficult to cast, and few roles fitting her talents were available.

Continuing with recording and making night club tours, with 'The Dinah Shore Show', she became the first woman to host her own variety show.

In 1962, however, Shore divorced George Montgomery and married Maurice Smith less than a year later. Shore and Smith divorced in 1964.

The 'Dinah Shore Chevy Show' closed in 1963, and Shore remained out of the spotlight until the scandal caused by her affair with the much younger Burt Reynolds, in the 1970s.

Through her long career, Dinah Shore earned eight Emmy Awards and a 1958 Peabody Award for her work in broadcasting. Her final series, the weekly 'A Conversation With Dinah', ended in 1991 as she began to suffer ever poorer health.

She died of cancer in California in 1994.