![]() ![]() Warners, never the ones to give up on anything which had cleaned up at the box-office, re-cycled the concept in Daughters Courageous (1939), Four Wives and Four Mothers (1940). Neither of the other Lane sisters being suitable, the fourth daughter was played by Gale Page. The amorous complications of the daughters, however, took up most of the footage, with the adolescent Priscilla going ape over Garfield. The family in Four Daughters found its members coping with with the Depression in a "typical" small town - with the artistic father ( Claude Rains) who worries about "the Foundation" and the chip-on-the-shoulder bum (John Garfield) who stumbles into town. She starred with Powell in Cowboy from Brooklyn (1938), which allowed her to sing, and then with her sisters Rosemary and Lola in Four Daughters (1938), based on a novel by Fannie Hurst actually called Sister Act. Morris was again Priscilla Lane's romantic pair - another couple were Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman (the first Mrs Reagan) - and the film was popular enough to spawn a sequel, Brother Rat and a Baby (1940).īy that time Warners were convinced that they had an A-list star (as we would now say) in Priscilla Lane. Both were comedies and merely programme fodder, but a bigger budget was ordered when the studio filmed a long-running Broadway play about romantic shenanigans at a college for army cadets, Brother Rat. Warners saw the publicity advantage of having all three under contract and Priscilla, the prettiest of them, was immediately teamed with Wayne Morris in Love, Honor and Behave (1938) and Men Are Such Fools. Waring and his Orchestra co-starred with Powell in Varsity Show, made earlier in 1937, with the two Lanes more or less playing themselves. Rosemary and Priscilla Lane had been vocalists with Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians, famous for "The Sweetest Music This Side of Heaven". ![]() Playing the lookalike who replaces her - and takes over the romantic lead with Dick Powell - was Rosemary Lane, who had arrived at the studio more directly but also via vaudeville. In 1937 Warner Bros put her under contract and gave her a star role as a temperamental movie queen, in one of its principal productions, Hollywood Hotel. Lola began it all at the age of 12 by playing the piano to accompany the flickers she and her older sister Leota went into vaudeville and by 1928 Lola was playing in movies. There were in fact five Lane sisters in show business, the daughters of a dentist called Mullican. Lane does not make all of the record books today, but if you catch the superb matching of Cagney and Bogart in The Roaring Twenties (1939) you will find Cagney and Lane above the title and Bogart below it. But before Fontaine emerged as a star, the Lanes - Rosemary, Lola and Priscilla - were the best-known sister act in movies, and Priscilla, the youngest of them, was briefly Warner Bros' biggest female star after Bette Davis and de Havilland. There were the Talmadges in the Silent era, Constance, Norma and Natalie, but the most famous movie sisters have to be Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland. Priscilla Mullican (Priscilla Lane), actress, singer: born Indianola, Iowa 12 June 1917 twice married died Andover, Massachusetts 4 April 1995. Selznick, Ida Lupino, Jane Wyman, Joan Fontaine, Madeleine Carroll, New York City, New York, Priscilla Lane, Robert Altman, Robert Cummings, Saboteur (1942), The 39 Steps (1935), Universal Studios, Warner Brothers keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Bette Davis, Cary Grant, Claude Rains, David O.newspaper: The Independent (10/Apr/1995). ![]()
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