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Singer-actress Dale Evans, 88, dies
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2001年2月7日这一天，美国著名的演员和歌手、88岁的戴尔·埃文斯离开了人间。她和她的丈夫罗伊·罗杰尔合作出演了27部西部片，是好莱坞的一对模范夫妻。而她也被大家公认为“西部片女皇”。
埃文斯认为现在的明星和上一代的演员不一样，现在的明星成功来的太快，赚取的是令人不可思议的片酬，他们也许会像流星一样，转瞬即失。
ACTRESS-SINGER Dale Evans, who earned the title ``Queen of the West'' by starring with her husband Roy Rogers in 27 cowboy films and writing their theme song, ``Happy Trails'', died on Wednesday at age 88.
Evans, who also co-starred with her husband on the popular 1950s NBC television series ``The Roy Rogers Show'', died of congestive heart failure at the couple's desert home in Apple Valley, northeast of Los Angeles, said film critic Leonard Maltin, a friend of the family.
Evans, who started out as a big-band singer in the 1930s, teamed up with Rogers in 1944 in ``The Cowboy and the Senorita''. They married in 1947 after the sudden death of Rogers' first wife and went on to become the most famous husband and wife team on the big screen. Rogers died in 1998.
With a bright, cheery presence, Evans proved to be an able partner and sidekick who could ride, rope and sing with the best of them in such films as ``The Yellow Rose of Texas", "My Pal Trigger", and "Apache Rose''.
She and Rogers rode together in 27 movies in all. But their on-screen chemistry was never anything but clean and wholesome, and Rogers recalled that he couldn't even plant a chaste (纯洁的) kiss on Evans' forehead without unleashing a torrent of protest mail.
``I had to kiss the horse,'' he once quipped.
Born Frances Octavia Smith on October 31, 1912 in Uvalde, Texas, she eloped with her high school sweetheart at age 14, but their union was short-lived.
A year later, as a single parent, she found herself in Memphis, Tennessee, and landed a job with local radio stations singing and playing piano under her married name, Frances Fox. During one radio stint, a station manager renamed her Dale Evans, after a silent-film star he admired, Dale Winter.
Discovered by talent scouts
After moving to Chicago to pursue her singing career, she was discovered by talent scouts at Paramount Studios who arranged for a Hollywood screen test, which led to a contract with 20th Century Fox.
She was then hired as a vocalist with the Ray Noble Orchestra on the NBC radio show starring Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, which led to more movie roles at Republic Pictures, including an appearance with John Wayne in ``In Old Oklahoma'' (1943).
When Republic Pictures executive Herbert Yates decided to put his leading cowboy star into a series of musical Westerns that would be more lavish than the ordinary Saturday pictures, he paired Rogers and Evans for ``The Cowboy and the Senorita'' (1944).
At the time, Rogers already was married and had two small daughters, while Evans was the single mother of a teenage son from her first marriage.
But in 1946, Rogers' wife, Arlene, died after the birth of their third child. He and Evans fell in love, and the following year, Rogers proposed to Evans on horseback as they were waiting to be announced at a stadium in Chicago. Presenting Evans with a ruby ring, he sang to her, ``What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?''
That New Year's Eve, they were married during a blizzard at the ``Flying L'' ranch in Oklahoma, where they had just completed filming ``Home in Oklahoma''.
Tragedy struck when their only biological child together, a daughter, died at age two from complications associated with Down's syndrome（唐氏综合症，先天愚型）, inspiring Evans to write the first of a series of inspirational books, ``Angel Unaware''.
Nevertheless, the family grew as the couple adopted or fostered four other children, two of whom later died in accidents.
In 1950, Rogers and Evans formed their own production company, which produced a weekly half-hour series, ``The Roy Rogers Show''， which ran until 1957 and continued in reruns into the '60s. And they continued to appear on network shows throughout the 1960s, '70s and '80s.
She said she felt sorry from some of today's rock stars: ``They are overnight successes making unbelievable amounts of money. They're like meteors, shooting up and then falling just as fast. People like Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Roy and me, we paid our dues. We've known the hard times and the good, and we appreciate what we've got.''
(SD-Agencies)
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