DESCRIPTION:
Looking For The Silver Lining, Fox Trot (J.Kern) from First National picture "Sally" -- The High Hatters conducted by Leonard Joy, Vocal refrain by Frank Luther, Victor 1929 (USA)

NOTE: Jerome Kern's "Look for the Silver Lining" was a trademark song of Marilyn Miller's - one of the most loved Broadway celebrities of the turn of 1920/30s. Miller sang it in the 1929 movie version of Sally, her first starring Broadway vehicle. Sally was a waitress and dishwasher who loses her job but ends up starring on Broadway and marrying a millionaire. That role belonged to typical genre of Marilyn Miller's, whose silver screen Cinderellas were, however, in distinct contrast to her personal life, which was marred by disappointment, tragedy, frequent illness, and ultimately her sudden death due to complications of nasal surgery at age 37.

Born Mary Ellen Reynolds in Evansville, Indiana in 1898, she was only 4 years old when she debuted in Dayton, Ohio as a member of her family's vaudeville trouppe Five Columbians, which also included Marilyn's mother, her step-father and two older sisters. For then years they toured in USA and Europe, before Lee Shubert discovered Marilyn at the Lotus Club in London in 1914. Back in USA, Marilyn Miller, the tiny, delicate-featured blonde beauty appeared in several Shubert's Broadway shows, but it was Florenz Ziegfeld who made her a star after she performed in his Ziegfeld Follies of 1918, at the famed New Amsterdam Theatre on 42nd Street, with music by Irving Berlin. In 1924, after a rift with Ziegfeld, she signed with rival producer Charles Dillingham and starred as Peter Pan in a 1924 Broadway revival, then as a circus queen in Sunny (1925), with music by Kern and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein. A box-office smash, it featured the classic Who?, and made her the highest paid star on Broadway. In 1928, after reuniting with Ziegfeld, she starred in his production of the successful George Gershwin musical Rosalie then in Smiles (1930) with Fred Astaire.

Miller's movie career was less successful than her stage career. She made only three films: Sally (1929); Sunny (1930); and Her Majesty Love (1931), with W.C. Fields. Her last professional outing was the 1934 Irving Berlin/Moss Hart musical, As Thousands Cheer, in which she appeared in the production number, "Easter Parade".

She was married three times: to Frank Carter, actor and acrobatic dancer, who was killed in a car crash; to Jack Pickford, brother of a famous film star Mary and drug and alcohol abuser, whom she divorced 5 years later; her third husband was Chester Lee O'Brien, a young chorus dancer whom she made a widower after having wasted a fortune on him, during one year of their married life.
In March, 1936 she entered a New York hospital in order to recover from increasing alcohol dependancy and a nervous breakdown, however she developed a sinus infection and died from complications following surgery on her nasal passages. She was 37.