Sandra Dee was born as Alexandra Cymboliak Zuck on April, 23, 1942 in Bayonne, New Jersey, USA. Her parents divorced before she was five. Her mother was of Carpatho-Rusyn ancestry and raised her in the Russian Orthodox Church. Changing her name to "Sandra Dee," she became a professional model by the age of four and subsequently progressed to television commercials.Sandra Dee began her career as a model and progressed to film. Best known for her portrayal of ingenues, Dee won a Golden Globe Award in 1959 as one of the year's most promising newcomers, and over several years her films were popular. By the late 1960s her career had started to decline, and a highly publicized marriage to Bobby Darin ended in divorce.
She rarely acted after this time, and her final years were marred by illness; Sandra Dee died as a result of renal failure.
she was a successful model. She moved on to Television commercials and also began acting. Sandra Dee was 14 when she was signed for her film debut as the youngest of four sisters in the film Until They Sail (1957). Her next few films were more soap opera story lines, but she had a chance to act with Lana Turner in Imitation of Life (1959). Her popular films that year with the teens were the beach movie Gidget (1959) and the young love movie A Summer Place (1959). With the success of the theme song in A Summer Place (1959), the movie became unforgettable to many young people.
In 1960, Sandra Dee married pop idol Bobby Darin. They were both in the film Come September (1961) followed by If a Man Answers (1962) and That Funny Feeling (1965).
Sandra Dee made a few appearances in made for Television movies, but it was the film Grease (1978) that made her famous to a new generation. While she was not in the film, one of the popular songs was "Look At Me, I'm Sandra Dee".
Sandra Dee's adult years were marked by ill health. She admitted that for most of her life she battled anorexia nervosa, depression and alcoholism. In 2000, it was reported that she had been diagnosed with several ailments, including throat cancer and kidney disease. Complications from kidney disease led to her death on February 20, 2005, at the Los Robles Hospital & Medical Center in Thousand Oaks, California.
Sandra Dee is interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Hollywood Hills, not far from her mother, Mary C. Douvan, who died on December 27, 1987. She is survived by her son, her daughter-in-law and two granddaughters.
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