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THERE isn't a more gifted Axminster Assassin on the West Coast than Mr. Donald David Dixon O'Connor. There isn't a hep-cat more on the beam than this blue-eyed jive expert who, at seventeen, looks fifteen, whose smile is half shy and half destructive and whose sense of timing is one of those imprints of genius that comes along once in a generation.
He got his movie job with Universal when the brass hats couldn't believe what they saw and heard when they interviewed him. The kid was not merely terrific, he was good.
Although it has long been considered impossible for a seventeen-year-old to be funny without being fresh, Donald O'Connor seems to have found the combination. His quick reflexes, his uncertain strut, his adolescent voice which changes without warning from a promising baritone to a dubious soprano and his utterly bewildered mein, even when he's handing out gratuitous advice to his elders, are as far removed from freshness as last month's herring.
Prior to his hilarious debut in movies, he made a partial career of changing his mind. He was born virtually between shows in Chicago, seventeen years ago last August. His mother was a vaudeville trooper. So was his father and so were four broth
ers. A fifth brother wasn't yet old enough to earn his living on the boards, but soon got around to it.
He passed his years between the ages of six and ten wanting to be a poet, or a fiction writer. These ambitions were stymied when he discovered that A was practically impossible for him to learn to spell. At seventeen, and a high school senior, he's the worst speller in the Universal Studios classrooms above the primary grades. Contrarily, he's one of the best mathematicians and a bearcat at history and English.
Donald trooped with his family until he was twelve years old. Then he appeared in Los Angeles with the rest of the O'Connors for a variety engagement and a benefit show. Director Wesley Ruggles, who was assembling a cast for Paramount's "Sing You Sinners," with Bing Crosby, saw the kid at the benefit and signed him for a dancing bit in the picture.
He had done acrobatics, hand balancing, trapeze twisting, trap drumming and trombone playing in his ten years on the stage. (He started at two.) Now he wowed Paramount with his hoofing and was signed to a term contract. That continued for five more pictures at Paramount before his career was interrupted by advancing age. He had become fourteen and lanky and his legs had gotten out of control.
Paramount failed to pick up his option and for two years he did nothing but sit glumly at home with growing pains and plans for a career outside the entertainment field.
He was (Continued on page 86) photoplay combined with movie mirror, july. 1943