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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 still has been personally autographed (signed) by Donna Reed! Note that this autographed 8x10 is one of 91 that were consigned to us by a former theater owner. He owned two different major theaters in Louisiana from the 1940s through the 1970s, and he sometimes had premieres of movies at his theaters, at which time some of the celebrities connected to the movies would appear in person (this was often done in the 1950s and 1960s). When celebrities came to his theater, he would have them autograph 8x10 stills for him in person, and that got him started collecting signed stills, so at some point in the 1950s, he began requesting the studios to have them send him stills signed by the stars of movies he had recently shown at his theater when he was holding a special event or having the anniversary of his theater's opening! Over the next decade, he collected 91 signed stills that were sent to him by the studios through the mail, as well as several dozen that he obtained in person. We auctioned those "in person" signed stills in our previous auctions, and now we are auctioning the 91 stills where he obtained the signatures through the mail from the studios.

We know for certain that he received these stills directly from the studios, but we can't say for certain if the stills were signed by the stars or if they were signed by secretaries. But since he owned a major theater, and since many of the stills were personalized to him (or to his theater), we would think it likely that most, if not all, of these 91 stills have genuine signatures that are NOT secretarial signatures. But we suggest that anyone bidding on these stills compare their signatures to other examples of that star's signature, so they can best determine if the signature is from that star.

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