Deanna Durbin, who died last month, was an actress who in her early days played the girl-next-door and often danced around the issue of getting spanked. In 1941, aged 20, the same year she was actually spanked in the movie Nice Girl, she was embroiled in a real life spanking threat in her conflict with Universal studios.
The hot gossip of the day was hat her husband of the time, Vaughn Paul and her in-laws publicly criticised both the studio and Deanna. One source at the time credited Paul as saying although the studio was “unfair,” Deanna was “out of line” and “needs a good spanking to bring her to her senses.”
One columnist even suggested that this spanking was as abortive as her on-screen punitive career; a reference to the number of spanking scenes that ended up on the cutting room floor on account of her on-screen image.
This last is only conjecture on their part. In any case Deanna Durbin was a Hollywood legend who died in April 2013 aged 91.
