Lucille Norman was a singer/actress who was busy on radio and the stage, and later recordings, from the beginnings of the 1940s through the late '50s. She was born Lucille Pharaby Boileau in Omaha, NE, in 1921, into a performing family. Both of her parents were singers on the Chatauqua stage until her father became a minister. Her father was also her first singing teacher, and she first sang in public at his lectures. Because of her parents' constant travels she was raised in large part by her grandparents into her teen years, but after completing grade school, she joined her parents in Colorado. She had appeared in operettas in school and discovered that she had a good enough voice to pursue a career. Her first step was getting a spot on local radio, which led to a summer engagement with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra. She spent two years of studying music at the Cincinnati Conservatory, and then headed to New York City to appear on radio in a broadcast audition for the Metropolitan Opera -- and there was a blackout in the studio just as she hit the final note of her recital. That broadcast led to an offer not from the Met but from a movie studio, which she turned down -- movie work simply being something she hadn't thought of doing. By the time she was back in Cincinnati, however, she had changed her mind and returned to do a screen test, which was successful. Suddenly, she was off to Hollywood and a small role, acting and singing, in the Judy Garland/Gene Kelly vehicle For Me and My Gal (1942) (which was also Kelly's debut). Norman was good enough in the film that she almost certainly could have gotten more movie work, but fate intervened in the form of Fred Finklehoffe, who had co-written the screenplay and was busy casting a new show he was producing. He saw Norman and immediately offered her a role in the piece, called Show Time, a vaudeville-style entertainment that was touring the country. She replaced Kitty Carlisle when it got to New York, in a role that had her doing songs and comedy with Jack Haley and George Jessel. Following the run of the show, she returned to radio work. By the end of the 1940s, she was back in California, singing at the Hollywood Bowl and once more doing movie work, starting with Painting the Clouds with Sunshine. Her recording career began in the late '40s and early '50s, and by the early '50s was working along no less a figure than Gordon MacRae, cutting a studio cast recording of the Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach musical Roberta for Capitol Records, a work she also did with MacRae on television. Alas, the particular brand of music in which Norman specialized was already declining by the mid-'50s, when the advent of rock & roll pushed it even further from the spotlight. By the end of the decade, she had retired from professional music. She passed away in 1998. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi