Sandra Dee, the perennially perky, blond-haired and blue-eyed actress who helped American teenagers of the late 1950s and early 1960s cope with the frustrations of adolescent romance and the temptations of premarital sex, died Sunday at the Los Robles Hospital and Medical Center in Thousand Oaks, Calif. She was 62.
The cause of the death was complications from kidney disease, said Steve Blauner, a family friend.
Ms. Dee was probably best remembered for her portrayal of Gidget, a tomboyish California teenager who discovered the joys of surfing and boys in Paul Wendkos’ 1959 film of the same name. The bright, chirpy Dee defined a new kind of natural, sun-soaked innocence that America, and much of the rest of the world, quickly embraced.
In 1960, Ms. Dee married Bobby Darin, her co-star in the 1961 romantic comedy “Come September,” after a whirlwind courtship. The story of her marriage to Darin, whom she divorced in 1967, is chronicled in Kevin Spacey’s recent theatrical film “Beyond the Sea,” in which Spacey plays Darin and Dee is played by Kate Bosworth.
Ms. Dee followed “Gidget” with Delmer Daves’ movie “A Summer Place” (1959), in which she was paired with Troy Donohue as teenage lovers whose innocent confusion about how far their relationship should go ran up against the hypocrisy of an adult world–a hypocrisy vividly embodied by their adulterous parents, played by Richard Egan and Dorothy McGuire.
A tremendous commercial success, “A Summer Place” was among the earliest studio movies to commodify youthful rebelliousness, though Ms. Dee was hardly an icon of adolescent revolt.
Born Alexandra Zuck in Bayonne, N.J., she began modeling in New York at an early age. Appearances in television commercials led her to Hollywood, where she made her movie debut in Robert Wise’s 1957 “Until They Sail.” Her first substantial role came in Vincent Minnelli’s romantic comedy “The Reluctant Debutante” (1958), in which she played the American-raised daughter of the Londoners Rex Harrison and Kay Kendall.
Ms. Dee soon proved to be as at home in melodrama as in comedy. She moved to Universal for Helmut Kautner’s “Restless Years,” portraying the illegitimate daughter of a neurotic woman trapped in a small town.
Ms. Dee remained at Universal for what was probably her finest sustained performance in certainly the most important of all her films, Douglas Sirk’s “Imitation of Life” (1959).
Playing the neglected daughter of a driven, manipulative Broadway star (Lana Turner), Ms. Dee projected a genuinely touching fragility, and convincingly turned on her uncaring mother in one notable scene.
Although Universal kept pushing her into teenage roles–as the barefoot, backwoods heroine of “Tammy, Tell Me True” (1961) and “Tammy and the Doctor” (1963, opposite an equally innocent young Peter Fonda)–her widely publicized marriage to Darin made her seem less acceptable as an adolescent.
In addition to “Come September,” Ms. Dee starred with her finger-snapping husband as a jealous young wife in “If a Man Answers” (1962) and as a maid posing as a successful publisher in “That Funny Feeling” (1965). In between, however, Ms. Dee returned to teenage roles, playing James Stewart’s peacenik daughter in “Take Her, She’s Mine” (1963).
Ms. Dee is survived by her son, Dodd Darin, and two granddaughters. In a March 1991 interview with People magazine, Ms. Dee said she used pills and alcohol and hit bottom after her mother died in 1988.
“I couldn’t function,” she told People, adding that she began drinking more than a quart of Scotch a day as her weight fell to 80 pounds. She said she stayed home almost constantly for three years.
Ms. Dee credited her son with helping her turn her life around.
