By the time that Dee was 12, she was a successful model. She moved on to Television commercials and also began acting. Dee was 14 when she was signed for her film debut as the youngest of four sisters in the film "Until They Sail (1957)". Her next few films were more soap opera story lines, but she had a chance to act with Lana Turner in "Imitation of Life (1959)". Her popular films that year with ...
show all By the time that Dee was 12, she was a successful model. She moved on to Television commercials and also began acting. Dee was 14 when she was signed for her film debut as the youngest of four sisters in the film "Until They Sail (1957)". Her next few films were more soap opera story lines, but she had a chance to act with Lana Turner in "Imitation of Life (1959)". Her popular films that year with the teens were the beach movie "Gidget (1959)" and the young love movie "A Summer Place (1959)". With the success of the theme song in "A Summer Place (1959)", the movie became unforgettable to many young people. In 1960, Sandra Dee married pop idol Bobby Darin. They were both in the film "Come September (1961)" followed by "If a Man Answers (1962)" and "That Funny Feeling (1965)". But after the first film, the quality of the pictures went down. As to Dee's other roles, she played a daughter in "Romanoff and Juliet (1961)" as well as a daughter in "Take Her, She's Mine (1963)". Her attempts to replace Debbie Reynolds as Tammy in "Tammy Tell Me True (1961)" and "Tammy and the Doctor (1963)" were mostly unsuccessful as Hollywood thought that it was the script and not the actress that made the Tammy character. Coupled with tired and sugary scripts, she was doomed to fail. By 1967, her marriage to Darin ended and so did her film career. There was little call for a teenage movie star to play daughters and such, when everyone knew that she was a divorcée. Plus, the face of movies had changed and sugary stories were not the ones that people wanted to see. In the 70s, Dee made a few appearances in made for Television movies, but it was the film "Grease (1978)" that made her famous to a new generation. While she was not in the film, one of the popular songs was "Look At Me, I'm Sandra Dee".
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