Debbie Reynolds Movies

Debbie Reynolds has been making movies since 1948.

Debbie Reynolds in her most famous movie….Singin’ In The Rain

Want to know the best Debbie Reynolds movies?  How about the worst Debbie Reynolds movies?  Curious about Debbie Reynolds box office grosses or which Debbie Reynolds movie picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Debbie Reynolds movie got the best reviews from critics and audiences? Well you have come to the right place….because we have all of that information.

The Drivel Part of the page.  A few years ago, my wife requested a Debbie Reynolds (1932-2016) movie ranking page.  For some unknown reason, especially since she has done so many things to make this website better and easier to maintain, I have failed to follow through with that request.  Well last night, I told my lovely wife that I was finally ready to publish her Debbie Reynolds page.  I then asked her for the first time why she wanted a Reynolds page.  Her response….”Because she has a cool first name”.  In case you could not guess it….my wife’s name is Debbie.  So for my Debbie….here is finally a Debbie Reynolds movie page.

Her IMDb page shows 83 acting credits from 1948-2015. This page will rank 38 Debbie Reynolds movies from Best to Worst in seven different sortable columns of information. Television shows, shorts, cameos and movies that were not released in North American theaters were not included in the rankings.  To do well in our rankings a movie has to do well at the box office, get good reviews by critics, be liked by audiences and get some award recognition.

Debbie Reynolds and Albert Brooks in 1996's Mother

Debbie Reynolds and Albert Brooks in 1996’s Mother

Debbie Reynolds Movies Can Be Ranked 6 Ways In This Table

The really cool thing about this table is that it is “user-sortable”. Rank the movies anyway you want.

  • Sort Debbie Reynolds movies by co-stars of her movies
  • Sort Debbie Reynolds movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost
  • Sort Debbie Reynolds movies by Box Office Rank By Year
  • Sort Debbie Reynolds movies by how they were received by critics and audiences.  60% rating or higher should indicate a good movie.
  • Sort by how many Oscar® nominations and how many Oscar® wins each Debbie Reynolds movie received.
  • Sort Debbie Reynolds movies by Ultimate Movie Ranking (UMR) Score.  UMR Score puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.
  • Use the sort and search box to make this table very interactive.

Stats and Possibly Interesting Things From The Above Debbie Reynolds Table

  1. Fifteen Debbie Reynolds movie crossed the magical $100 million domestic gross mark.  That is a percentage of 39.47% of her movies listed. How the West Was Won (1963) is her biggest box office hit.
  2. An average Debbie Reynolds movie grosses $88.90 million in adjusted box office gross.
  3. Using RottenTomatoes.com’s 60% fresh meter.  30 of Debbie Reynolds’s movies are rated as good movies…or 78.94% of her movies.  Singin’ in the Rain (1952) is her highest rated movie while One For the Money (2011) is her lowest rated movie.
  4. Thirteen Debbie Reynolds movies received at least one Oscar® nomination in any category…..or 34.21% of her movies.
  5. One Debbie Reynolds movies won at least one Oscar® in any category…..or 2.63% of her movies.
  6. An average Ultimate Movie Ranking (UMR) Score is 40.00.  23 Debbie Reynolds movie scored higher that average….or 60.52% of her movies.  How the West Was Won (1963) got the the highest UMR Score while One For the Money (2011) got the lowest UMR Score.
Debbie Reynolds in 1963's How The West Was Won....the blu-ray is one to own...visually stunning

Debbie Reynolds in 1963’s How The West Was Won….the blu-ray is one to own…visually stunning

Possibly Interesting Facts About Debbie Reynolds

1. Mary Frances Reynolds was born in El Paso, Texas in 1932.

2. Debbie Reynolds was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar® nomination for The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1965).  She received a Honorary Oscar in 2015.

3. Debbie Reynolds was nominated 4 times (movie roles only) for a Golden Globe®:  1950’s Three Little Words, 1956’s Bundle of Joy, 1965’s The Unsinkable Molly Brown and 1996’s Mother.

4. Debbie Reynolds has been married 3 times.  Her first marriage was to Eddie Fisher from 1955 to 1959…they had two children.  Her second marriage was to Harry Karl from 1960 to 1973.  Her third marriage was to Richard Hamlett from 1984 to 1996.

5. Debbie Reynolds’ son, Todd, is a writer, director and actor. Her daughter, Carrie is also a writer and actress…she is best known for her role as Princess Leia in the Star Wars movies.  Her granddaughter, Billie Lourd, has a role in the television series The Scream Queens as well as a role in Star Wars 7.

6. Debbie Reynolds is one of the few actresses to have danced with both Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly on screen. Other actresses who have done this include: Judy Garland, Cyd Charisse, Vera-Ellen, Rita Hayworth and Leslie Caron.

7. My favorite behind the scenes story about her classic movie Singin’ In The Rain (1952).    Gene Kelly has said…..”I wasn’t nice to Debbie. It’s a wonder she still speaks to me.”  Once after Kelly insulted Reynolds for not being able to dance, Fred Astaire, who was hanging around the studio, found her crying under a piano and helped her with her dancing.

8.  Debbie Reynolds is the president of The Thalians, an organization for the treatment of mental health at Cedars Sinai in Los Angeles.  She has been actively involved in building this celebrity run organization for over 30 years.

9.  Nearly all the money Debbie Reynolds makes is spent toward her goal of creating a Hollywood museum. Her collection numbers more than 3000 costumes and 46,000 square-feet worth of props and equipment.  That would be a musuem I would want to visit.

10. Check out Debbie Reynolds‘ career compared to current and classic actors.  Most 100 Million Dollar Movies of All-Time.

 

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62 thoughts on “Debbie Reynolds Movies

  1. Thank you for your excellent article on Debbie Reynolds.
    You forgot to include the film Pepe (1960), in which she did a famous dance with famed Mexican comedian Cantinflas. The music piece was called “Tequila” and I think it was nominated for an Academy Award.
    Thank you and keep up the good work.

    1. Hey Frank….I was just making our Edith Head page dynamic….when I ran across Pepe….so I went ahead and added Debbie Reynolds to that page….thanks for the heads up on that error…it is greatly appreciated.

  2. Hey Bob…sorry that Debbie’s passing is hitting your house hard. I imagine your memory of The Tender Trap has been running through your head numerous times the last few days.

    Yep only 3 of the AFI legends are still around. On the good side of things the other 47 are still around in our memory….not to mention the 1000s of movies they left behind

  3. (1) Many people are familiar with Debbie’s Singing in the Rain and most movie buffs will be aware of The Tender Trap which she made with Sinatra. However in the early fifties she was in a string of minor musicals that most people today will probably never even have heard of and it was a nostalgic treat for me to see them listed in your video as they were a big part of my ‘coming of age’ as a moviegoer. They are Athena, Give a Girl a Break, I Love Melvin, Hit the Deck and The Affairs of Dobie Gillis.
    (2) Great posters for I Love Melvin, The 2nd Time Around and What’s the Matter with Helen?
    (3) I liked the still of Debbie and Sinatra from Tender trap and the closing coloured one Debbie reminds us how lovely she looked when she was young. Fine one too of her and Eddie Fisher from Bundle of Joy He was never much of an actor but I love his voice.
    (4) You and Bruce agree on 3 of the Top 5. He again took me by surprise when for audience/critic he ranked The Unsinkable Molly Brown, your No 5, as low as No 11 and gave it just a 69% rating. I agree with your ranking this time as I always regarded it as Debbie’s strongest stand-alone hit. I think that we’ll have to dub Bruce the Brando of the Cogerson site because he always seems to be striving to be different!
    (5) Overall you have presented a comprehensive profile of a star who in her heyday epitomised an era of cinematic innocence that is now long gone – 9.2/10

    1. Hi Bob, thanks for reviewing and rating my video, always appreciated. A video on Debbie Reynolds was always on the cards. I just didn’t expect to be adding her date of death on it, it’s so sad. I may do a video on her daughter Carrie some time next year.

      You’ve seen a lot more of her films than I have. In her comment Flora mentions she’s seen 20 of the 30 on my video which is pretty impressive.

      I watched Singin’ in the Rain again at Xmas. Reynolds was only 20 years old and later claimed that “Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and childbirth were the two hardest things I ever had to do in my life.”

      There are some opposites to mine on Bruce’s chart but Singin’ in the Rain tops the critics chart, as it should. Another big favorite of mine How the West Was Won tops the UMR chart. $442m adjusted domestic is pretty impressive for that epic western.

      Singin’ in the Rain didn’t do too badly either with $189m, that’s a bit less than An American in Paris but more than On the Town. Another classic musical I watched at Xmas – The Band Wagon – only did $98m domestic, Kelly was the bigger draw in the 50s. (who says I’m not interested in grosses?) 🙂

      1. I should have added Fred Astaire’s name after ‘The Band Wagon’ so the last sentence mentioning Kelly would make more sense. But I’m sure everyone knows Astaire was the star of that great musical.

      2. STEVE:
        1 Ironically historians claim that two Gene Kelly commercial failures Brigadoon in 1954 and It’s Always Fair Weather in 1955 were the harbingers of the decline of the Hollywood musical in its then-existing form as a standard Hollywood product. The historians say that by the end of the fifties musicals became fewer, they were normally based on stage plays and Hollywood avoided scripting ITS OWN ones as it used to do.

        2 If the historians are accurate then those Debbie Reynolds musicals films that I loved so much in my youth were unbeknown to me the final successful flush of the old Hollywood musical.

        1. STEVE

          Wikipedia confirms that the two Kelly films I mentioned lost between them $29 million in today’s money. Today with production costs being so large producers are used to those kinds of losses but in the early fifties they were regarded as catastropic.

          1. Happy New Year Bob!

            Thanks for the added info, I suppose by the mid 1950s expensive musicals based on Broadway hits were the big grossers – Carousel, South Pacific, Oklahoma and The King and I for example.

            And the trend continued into the 1960s, 4 of the Best Picture Oscar winners of the 1960s were musicals – West Side Story, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music and Oliver!

            By the 1970s musicals were passe, violent cop thrillers and gangster movies were the big draw for a while.

      3. Good stuff here…proud day when I see you spitting our classic adjusted box office grosses…..can’t type anymore…my eyes are watering up too much. Looking forward to checking out your Reynolds page.

    2. Hey Bob….great thoughts on Debbie Reynolds.
      1. Good review on Steve’s video.
      2. 69% is a good rating in my system….so I do not feel bad about where Molly ended up….it is in her top third…and it is a movie I want to see
      3. Lots of good information on her early career…..it was so sad to hear about her passing.
      RIP Debbie Reynolds.

      1. 1 The passing of Debbie probably means a lot more to me than it does to many people as I grew up with her becoming a household name. I can still remember the summer evening I went to see her and Sinatra in The Tender Trap and she was just 23 at the time.

        2 Indeed when I look over over the AFI Legends list with the exception of Harlow and Lombard all of them were either thriving or at least still around in the early fifties when I first started watching movies and now only Poitier and Kirk among the men and Sophia Loren among the women are still alive “Out brief candle, out.” – William Shakespeare.

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