Sandra Dee, the bright-eyed, blond beauty who became a teen sensation in films such as “Gidget” and “Tammy Tell Me True” and who married pop singer Bobby Darin, died yesterday at 62.
The actress had been undergoing treatment for complications of kidney disease and pneumonia when she passed away at Los Robles Hospital & Medical Center in Thousand Oaks, Calif.
Born Alexandra Zuck in Bayonne, N.J., and raised on Long Island and in Manhattan, Dee became a model in grade school and was earning $70,000 a year by age 14.
Her career blasted off in 1957, when she signed a seven-year contract with Universal Pictures.
Dee went on to star as a fun-loving surfer girl, “Gidget,” and appeared in “Imitation of Life,” “A Summer Place,” “Portrait in Black, “Tammy Tell Me True” and “Take Her She’s Mine.”
After a whirlwind, one-month courtship, Dee wed Darin in 1960, and the couple had a son, Dodd.
They separated in 1966 and divorced in 1967. Around the same time, Dee was devastated when Universal dropped her, later lamenting that, “I was simply a piece of property to them.”
She made a few more movies and did TV work on shows such as “Night Gallery” and “Fantasy Island,” but her once enormous appeal had faded.
In a 1991 interview, Dee revealed she had been sexually abused as a child by her stepfather.
She said she turned to pills and alcohol and hit rock bottom after her mother died in 1988.
“I couldn’t function,” she told People, adding she was downing more than a quart of scotch a day as her weight fell to 80 pounds.
Last year, Kate Bosworth portrayed Dee in the Bobby Darin biopic, “Beyond the Sea.”
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SANDRA DEE
BORN: April 23, 1942
BIRTH NAME: Alexandra Zuck
HOMETOWN: Bayonne, N.J.
MARRIED TO: Bobby Darin (1960-67)
CHILDREN: Dodd Darin
MOVIES: “Gidget,” “A Summer Place” (with Troy Donahue, left), “Imitation of Life,” “Tammy and the Doctor,” “That Funny Feeling”
AWARDS: Golden Globe for most promising female newcomer (1958)
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