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Donna Reed was born Donna Belle Mullenger on a farm in Iowa in 1921. She won a local beauty pageant as a teen, and then went to college in Los Angeles. While in college she was in some plays, and was seen by MGM scouts, and was signed to a contract, but she finished college before making her first movie in 1941. After some small roles she essentially played the female lead in The Courtship of Andy Hardy, but she mostly appeared in secondary roles in many MGM films (they put her in 18 movies in five years). During WWII she was very popular with soldiers, both because she really looked like the "girl next door" and because she personally replied to many letters from GIs. A big break came in 1946 when she was loaned to RKO as the female lead of Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life. That led to better roles than she had had before, but in mostly forgettable movies. In 1953, she played the key role of Alma 'Lorene' Burke in Fred Zinnemann's From Here To Eternity (winner of the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for this film). In the novel, the character was a prostitute, but most of the steamy aspects of the novel had to be drastically changed in order to bring it to the screen in those much more innocent times, and the character became a bizarre "hostess" at a club, and it made sense to cast squeaky clean Donna Reed in the role. Reed and the entire movie were much praised, and she won the Best Actress Oscar. But her roles didn't get much better, and she began to do some TV, and in 1958 she got her third big break when she starred in The Donna Reed Show, as one of the quintessential housewives and stay at home moms of the 1950s, Donna Stone (the show was somewhat over-shadowed by the equally popular Father Knows Best, but both shows had very appealing casts and covered very similar ground). Reed had one more time in the spotlight in 1984, when she agreed to replace Barbara Bel Geddes in the role of Miss Ellie in the very popular TV show Dallas after Bel Geddes quit the show. When Bel Geddes agreed to come back a year later, Reed was fired, and she sued the shows producers and settled for over a million dollars! She passed away in 1986 at the age of 64 from pancreatic cancer.

Important Added Info: Note that this is a negative that was in the camera when the photographer shot the photo (see below for more on this). We have put a scan of the negative that shows the "positive image" (in addition to a photo of the negative image, so you can better see its condition). REMEMBER THAT WHAT YOU RECEIVE WILL BE A PHOTOGRAPHIC NEGATIVE, NOT A POSITIVE IMAGE LIKE YOU ARE SEEING (however, the archive that owned this made an 8x10 positive print from it that will be included with the negative). However, we will provide the winning bidder of this auction that positive image scan that is both high quality and not watermarked (on request to the winning bidder, and only the winning bidder). We scanned it, so that bidders could see just how high quality it is. What are camera original negatives? These often (but not always) have retouching on the emulsion side, and negative numbers written in India ink on the front. Depending on the studio some 8x10 negatives may be trimmed or have numbers or information embedded into the sides of the negative. Obviously, camera original negatives are far more rare (and far more desirable) than studio-issued ones, but both are very high quality, and both can be used to make extremely high resolution positive prints of the image.

Note that this negative (and 96 others we are currently auctioning, in 97 separate auctions) has a wonderful provenance! From 1938 through the 1960s, movie fans would purchase photos of their favorite movie stars from a company in Brooklyn, New York, called "Movie Star News". This company, owned by Irving Klaw, sold a massive number of repro photos, because it became widely known to have some of the highest quality movie star images there were, as good or better than what the studios themselves produced. It turns out that Klaw had obtained the negatives that he made his photos from directly from the major studios, who apparently did not want to store negatives due to the fear of them being a fire hazard. He amassed an unmatched collection of over 20,000 negatives of all the top Hollywood stars, and over half of them were "camera originals", meaning they were the ones in the camera when the photographer took the image, and were hand retouched by the photographer (if retouching was necessary).

Irving Klaw died in 1966, and his nephew continued his business for many years, but he closed the business in 2012, and the archive of negatives passed through several hands before being acquired by a company that hired a professional archivist to spend over a year cataloging the negatives. The 97 negatives we are currently auctioning are from this amazing archive, and approximately half of them are camera originals, and half are "studio negatives" (created by the studio directly from the camera original). See above for which type of negative the one in this auction is. These include wonderful images of top Hollywood stars! This is an amazing opportunity to not only purchase ultra rare negatives, but also to obtain ones from one of the most legendary archives ever assembled!

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