Debra Paget (born Debralee Griffin; August 19, 1933) is an American retired actress and entertainer. She is perhaps best known for her performances in Cecil B. DeMille's epic The Ten Commandments (1956) and in Elvis Presley's film debut, Love Me Tender (1956), as well as for the risqué (for the time) snake dance scene in The Indian Tomb (1959).
Early life
Paget was born in Denver, Colorado, one of five children of Margaret Allen (née Gibson), a former actress (one source says "ex-burlesque queen"[1]) and Frank Henry Griffin, a painter.[2][3] The family moved to Los Angeles, California, in the 1930s to be close to the film industry. Paget was enrolled in the Hollywood Professional School when she was 11.[1] Margaret was determined that Debra and her siblings would also make their careers in show business. Three of Paget's siblings, Marcia (Teala Loring), Leslie (Lisa Gaye), and Frank (Ruell Shayne), entered show business.[4]
Paget had her first professional job at age 8,[4] and acquired some stage experience at 13 when she acted in a 1946 production of Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Paget’s first vehicle for Fox was the successful Broken Arrow with James Stewart. At the age of 16, Paget played a Native American maiden, Sonseeahray ("morningstar"), who falls in love with Stewart's character. Stewart was 42 at the time.
From 1950 to 1956, she took part in six original radio plays dramatized and performed for the nationwide audience on live radio broadcasts for the Family Theater. During those same years, she read parts in four episodes broadcast performing various recently released and upcoming theatrical feature movies on the ''Lux Radio Theatre'' program, sharing the microphone with such actors as Burt Lancaster, Tyrone Power, Cesar Romero, Ronald Colman, and Robert Stack. The latter set included dramatizations of two of her feature films.
Paget had a substantial supporting role in Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954), starring Victor Mature, the Biblical / New Testament / Roman Empire sequel to the earlier ''The Robe'', (1953), starring Richard Burton, Jean Simmons and Victor Mature. Like the first film, it was a massive commercial success. She was Dale Robertson's love interest in The Gambler from Natchez (1954) and played another Native American in the next year's White Feather (1955), playing the sister of Jeffrey Hunter's character, and lover of Robert Wagner's character.
Fox loaned Paget and Hunter to Allied Artists to appear in Seven Angry Men (1955). At MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) , when Anne Bancroft was injured during filming The Last Hunt (1956), that studio borrowed Paget to substitute and play her role, another Native American.
Paramount Pictures borrowed her from 20th Century Fox for the part of Lilia, the water girl, in Cecil B. DeMille's (1881-1959), biblical epic The Ten Commandments (1956), her most successful film. She had to wear brown contact lenses to hide her blue eyes; she said that "If it hadn't been for the lenses I wouldn't have gotten the part".[6] However, she also said that the lenses were "awful to work in because the klieg lights heat[ed] them up".[6]
The film was a huge success, as was Paget's Fox western, Love Me Tender (1956) alongside Elvis Presley; (1935-1977), Paget and Richard Egan (1921-1987), were billed above Presley, but it was the explosion of the newly discovered rock 'n roll singer's popularity and charisma that made the film so successful.
After that, Paget's career began to decline. She went to Paramount Pictures to play Cornel Wilde's love interest in Omar Khayyam (1957). She was the juvenile lead in From the Earth to the Moon (1958), based on the famous Jules Verne science fiction 1865 novel of near a century earlier. A talented dancer and singer, Paget also had a successful occasional nightclub act at the famous Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada.[7]
Europe
In 1958, she traveled to Germany to headline the cast of Fritz Lang's two-film adventure saga, The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb (1959), a role that recalled her character in Princess of the Nile.
In 1959, Paget appeared as Lela Russell in the episode "The Unwilling" of the NBCWestern television seriesRiverboat, (1959-1961), starring Darren McGavin. In the story line, Dan Simpson, played by Eddie Albert, attempts to open a general store despite a raid from pirates who stole $20,000 in merchandise. Actor Russell Johnson appears in this episode as Darius. In its first episode of its third season in September 1959, she played a pretty Mexican revolutionary and with a gang of rebels who hijack an eastbound stagecoach from California carrying the Wagon Train crew back east to St. Louis in order to smuggle weapons across the border to help a revolt against dictator Porfilio Diaz in an episode of NBC's Wagon Train
In 1960, she appeared as Laura Ashley in the episode "Incident of the Garden of Eden" on CBS's Western series, Rawhide. That same year, she had played an author, Agnes St. John, the only surviving witness to a brutal stagecoach robbery in another CBS Western, Johnny Ringo, starring Don Durant in the title role. In 1962, she returned to Rawhide to play the part of Azuela in the episode "Hostage Child" along with James Coburn.
She did television work throughout her career. Her last performance in this medium came in a December 1965 episode of ABC's legal drama of Burke's Law, (1963-1966), starring Gene Barry (1919-2009). She finally retired from entertainment roles in film and television in 1965, after marrying a wealthy oil executive, by whom she later had one son, her only child.[5]
Later career
Paget became a born-again evangelical Christian. She hosted her own show, An Interlude with Debra Paget, on the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), a conservative / fundamentalist Christian cable television network, in the early 1990s, and also was involved in Praise the Lord. She occasionally appeared on TBN as a guest.[4]
In 1987, the Motion Picture and Television Fund presented Paget with its Golden Boot Award, which is awarded to those actors, writers, directors, and stunt crew who "have contributed so much to the development and preservation of the western tradition in film and television."
Independent filmmaker Mark Rappaport paid tribute to her in his 2016 documentary essay, Debra Paget, For Example.[8]
Personal life
During production of Love Me Tender (1956), Elvis Presley became smitten with Paget, who in 1997 said that he had proposed marriage. At the time, however, the media reported that she was once romantically linked with famous aerospace industrialist / aviator and billionaire Howard, Hughes (1905-1976), but nothing came of this infatuation.[9] A 1956 article quoted Paget's comments about Hughes:
I was in love with Howard for two years, and I don't care who knows it... I was never alone with him in the whole two years. Mother was always with us... I haven't seen Howard for a long time now, because I'm a one-man woman, and I've got to have a one-woman man... But I'll always remember Howard with fondness.[1]
Paget married actor and singer David Street on January 14, 1958,[10] but she obtained a divorce on April 11, 1958.[11]
On March 27, 1960, she married Budd Boetticher, a director, in Tijuana, Mexico.[12] They separated after 22 days, and their divorce became official in 1961.
Paget left the entertainment industry in 1964 after marrying Louis Ling-Chieh Kung (孔令傑) on April 19, 1962.[13] Kung was a Chinese-American oil industry executive. His parents were banker and politician H. H. Kung and businesswoman Soong Ai-ling. His maternal aunts were Soong Mei-ling, wife of Chiang Kai-shek and First Lady of the Republic of China, and political figure Soong Ching-ling. Paget and Kung had one son, Gregory Teh-chi Kung. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1980.[14]
