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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! Also note that this still measures 8 1/4" x 10 1/4" [21 x 26 cm].

Note that this autographed 8x10 is part of a remarkable new collection we have been consigned, and we are auctioning nearly 500 items from this collection in this set of auctions (we will have more from this collection in our next few sets of autograph auctions).
     In the 1970s, our consignor was a high school teacher who taught a film class, and one day a week (and all through the summer) he ran the local movie theater (and he saved all the presskits and one-sheets from the movies the theater showed).
     Starting in the late 1970s, but increasingly greatly in the early 1980s, he hit on the idea of writing to famous celebrities, and enclosing an 8x10 from his collection, and he wrote a literate personalized letter, talking about his work as a film teacher, and discussing his favorite movie by that star.
     He often was able to locate an 8x10 still from his collection that was from a really good movie from that star, or one that had a really good image of that star. In a relatively small number of cases, he did not have a still in his collection to send, so he bought a reproduction from a photo shop, and sent that instead, which is why some of the items that have this notation on them are reproductions.
     He received signed photos back from a good percentage of the people he wrote to, and if the people simply sent him a stock photo back, he did not save it, but if he felt the autograph was genuine, and if they added a personalized note, then he did save them.
     In the late 1980s, he pretty much stopped sending letters and photos, simply because he was just too busy. So this photo (and the vast majority of the other photos we are auctioning for this consignor) were obtained in the mid-1980s, through personal correspondence with this star. This is of course excellent, because back at that time celebrities were not selling their signatures nearly as much, and many of the stars were pretty forgotten and were happy to get letters from people like our consignor!
     He of course does not have any "Certificates of Authenticity", but he only kept ones he felt were surely authentic, and those are the ones we are auctioning. However, bidders can certainly compare the signatures to known examples on the internet to judge for themselves.

As is true of all the signed items we are currently auctioning, we give every buyer 30 days in which to review what they purchased and they can return any item as long as it is within 30 days of the end of the auction. On non-signed items, we give a "lifetime guarantee" on everything we auction, but on signed items, we give the above modified guarantee of 30 days after the auction closes.

Our address for UPS or FedEx only is:
Bruce Hershenson,
306 Washington Avenue, West Plains, MO 65775