"[2] The family moved to Scranton, Pennsylvania, where Gloria Jean sang with Paul Whiteman's orchestra on radio broadcasts.

"[3] Jean was being trained as a coloratura soprano when her voice teacher, Leah Russel, took her to an audition held by Universal Pictures movie producer Joe Pasternak in 1938.

[6] Under contract to Universal, she was given the leading role in the feature The Under-Pup (1939), which starred Robert Cummings and Nan Grey who had been in Three Smart Girls Grow Up with Durbin.

She then starred in the well-received A Little Bit of Heaven (1940), which reunited her with many from the Under-Pup cast, including Nan Grey; the male lead was Robert Stack who appeared opposite Durbin several times.

"[9] Universal recognized the need for musical entertainment during wartime, and Jean became one of the studio's most prolific performers; during the war years she made 14 feature films.

Most were "hepcat" musicals geared to the teenagers of the day, and Universal used them to introduce new young talent, including Donald O'Connor, Peggy Ryan, Mel Tormé, and Marshall Thompson.

[10] She supported The Andrews Sisters in What's Cookin' (1942) then appeared with Donald O'Connor, Jane Frazee, Robert Paige and Peggy Ryan in Get Hep to Love (1942).

However, Universal removed the half-hour sequence and shelved it, at the insistence of a major stockholder who exerted a great deal of control at the studio.

[6] Columnist Edwin Schallert commented at the time: "For Gloria the fact that she did not appear in Flesh and Fantasy was a heartbreak, and she declares she's had a number of them even thus far in her experience.

'"[12] In the wake of Flesh and Fantasy, Universal tried to give Jean a smooth transition from adolescent roles to leading-lady status.

Jean's next starring film was Moonlight in Vermont (1943) with Ray Malone and Betty McCabe, a one-shot attempt to create a new O'Connor-Ryan song-and-dance team.

When Jean's Universal contract expired at the end of 1944, her agent Eddie Sherman (who was also Abbott and Costello's manager) persuaded her against renewing it,[6] citing the need for "a transition period to make the change from child to adult roles.

The half-hour sequence from Flesh and Fantasy was finally expanded into a feature-length melodrama, Destiny (1944); and scripts had already been prepared for Fairy Tale Murder (1945) (released in the United States as River Gang) and Easy to Look At.

In England, her rendition of "The Lord's Prayer" (and the lyric "forgive us our debts") was taken by some critics as a pointed comment about America's lend-lease policy.

Her best-known performances of the early 1950s were six Snader Telescriptions (three-minute musicals syndicated for television), later compiled into the TV series Showtime.

After Air Strike, Jean was hired by the owner of the Tahitian restaurant in Studio City, California, as a hostess,[18] greeting and seating dinner guests.

Show-business patrons were surprised that a film star had resorted to restaurant work, resulting in sympathetic feature stories in the national press.

Veteran Hollywood producer Edward Finney, himself a fan of Jean, saw one of these reports and hired her to star in the lightweight comedy Laffing Time (filmed in 1959, re-released as The Madcaps in 1964).

[6] Jerry Lewis also read that Jean was working in a restaurant, and signed her for a singing role in his latest production, The Ladies Man (1961).

Newspaper columnist Bob Thomas reported that Jean was engaged to a pilot who was killed in the Korean War.

I decided, unlike so many other child stars, that instead of just sitting around waiting for work in the acting business, I'd pick myself up and go out and get a job.

Very late in life she suffered health problems, including two serious falls that slowed her mobility, and a heart condition.

She died of heart failure and pneumonia on August 31, 2018, in a hospital near her home in Mountain View, Hawaii, at the age of 92.