She was just nineteen when she played Kathy Selden in Singin’ in the Rain. This was the year Shirley Booth won Best Actress for Come Back, Little Sheba, and I can promise you that Singin’ in the Rain was better. I haven’t seen The Unsinkable Molly Brown, so I can’t speak to the one time Debbie Reynolds was actually nominated for an Oscar, but while Booth’s was the only nominated performance I’ve seen from 1952, I’d at bare minimum have given Reynolds Booth’s slot, if not the win.

The problem is that we as a society underrate what Debbie Reynolds has always done best—light comedy with some singing and dancing. Oh, it paid well enough, true, but it doesn’t get a lot of credit. She’s not Gene Kelly, so she doesn’t get the credit. It really is pretty much that simple. No, she wasn’t as good at dancing as Gene Kelly, but you know, comedy is hard. Or anyway, good comedy is hard!

This may in part be why I focus so much on comedians in the column; I feel as though they deserve a lot more credit than they get. I’d rather watch Singin’ in the Rain most days than a lot of dramas, and that’s leaving aside how desperately boring I found Come Back, Little Sheba! Reynolds performed her role with flair and panache, and she doesn’t get as much attention for it as people who are less successful in more serious roles.

Not that there’s anything wrong with serious roles, and not that I’m saying Reynolds was incapable of them. She showed a real fire in How the West Was Won, playing dance hall girl Lilith Prescott. However, if you look through her films, it’s about the closest she got, right up there with the role of Charlotte in the animated ’70s Charlotte’s Web. There just isn’t a lot of dramatic weight to a career of playing Tammy or the Singing Nun.

Still, Debbie Reynolds was a powerhouse, appearing in thirty-four movies in the ’50s and ’60s alone. She also underwent a highly publicized divorce from first husband Eddie Fisher, though she eventually made up with Elizabeth Taylor on the subject. And you’ve maybe heard of her daughter, Carrie.

I don’t know if it’s because of Carrie’s issues or not, but you may recall that Debbie Reynolds won the Jean M. Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the last Oscars. This is for her work with The Thalians, a charity that deals with mental health issues. Right now, their focus is primarily on veterans, but they also work to help reduce the stigma associated with mental illness. Several of their honorees have appeared in this column before; many others won’t on the grounds of being dead, I’ll admit, but there are also a couple who are on my “coming soon” list. Their badly-in-need-of-a-redesign site is http://www.thalians.org. I’m always up for mentioning a good charity.