page_title: Marilyn Maxwell
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Marilyn Maxwell / Career
caption_attribution_description: Cropped screenshot of Marilyn Maxwell from the trailer for the film Stand by for Action.
context_page_description: Marvel Marilyn Maxwell was an American actress and entertainer. In a career that spanned the 1940s and 1950s, she appeared in several films and radio programs, and entertained the troops during World War II and the Korean War on USO tours with Bob Hope.
context_section_description: She started her professional entertaining career as a radio singer and a singer on stage with Ted Weems' big band while still a teenager, then she signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1942 as a contract player. Among the radio programs in which she appeared were Beat the Band and The Abbott and Costello Show. Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM, insisted she change the Marvel part of her real name. She dropped her first name and kept the middle one.  Some of her film roles included Lost in a Harem (1944), Champion (1949), The Lemon Drop Kid (1951), New York Confidential (1955) and Rock-A-Bye Baby (1958). The eventual popular Christmas carol "Silver Bells" made its debut in The Lemon Drop Kid, sung by Maxwell and Hope.
  Maxwell appeared twice as a singer in the second season (1955–1956) of The Jimmy Durante Show.
caption: From the trailer for Stand by for Action (1942)
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