Shirley Ross
American actress, singer (1913-1975)
Shirley Ross (born Bernice Maude Gaunt, January 7, 1913 – March 9, 1975) was an American actress and singer, notable for her duet with Bob Hope, "Thanks for the Memory" from The Big Broadcast of 1938. She appeared in 25 feature films between 1933 and 1945, including singing earlier and wholly different lyrics for the Rodgers and Hart song in Manhattan Melodrama (1934) that later became "Blue Moon."
Early musical career
Ross was born in Omaha, Nebraska, the elder of two daughters of Charles Burr Gaunt and Maude C. (née Ellis) Gaunt. Growing up in California, she attended Hollywood High School and UCLA, training as a classical pianist.
By age 14, she was giving radio recitals and made her first vocal recordings at 20 with Gus Arnheim's band.
Here she attracted the notice of the up-and-coming songwriting duo Rodgers and Hart, who selected her to sell their latest offerings to the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie studio. One song, "Prayer," later rewritten as "Blue Moon", led to a successful screen test in 1933. This test, a duet with jazz vocalist Harry Barris, was edited into MGM's musical-comedy short subject Gentlemen of Polish (1934), starring the comedy team of Al Shaw and Sam Lee.
MGM cast Ross in a number of small parts in films that included Manhattan Melodrama with Clark Gable and William Powell in which, made up to look black, she sang "The Bad in Every Man," an earlier version of "Blue Moon," in a Harlem nightclub.
Paramount
In 1936, MGM loaned her to Paramount, and she was paired with Ray Milland in The Big Broadcast of 1937. The Big Broadcast format emphasized musical numbers and comedy sketches with big-name performers who somewhat overshadowed her.
“Shirley Ross” enters the record as american actress, singer (1913-1975). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Shirley, Ross and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Shirley Ross” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Shirley, Ross and American provides the most credible route into that argument.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7498838. VIAF identifies the subject as 2672218. The Library of Congress control number is n85273936. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1913, 1975, 1938 and 1933.
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This entry incorporates text from “Shirley Ross” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.