b. June Stovenour, 10 June 1926, Rock Island, Illinois, USA, d. 4 July 2005, Brentwood, California, USA. A vivacious singer and actress in several 20th Century-Fox musicals of the 40s and early 50s, who gave up her career after marrying the highly successful film actor Fred MacMurray. A talented all-round entertainer as a youngster - she is said to have played the piano with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra - Haver sang with dance bands before landing the part of a hat-check girl in the Alice Faye movie The Gang’s All Here in 1943. A year later, when she co-starred with crooner Dick Haymes in When Irish Eyes Are Smiling, she was being tipped as the successor to Betty Grable. During the course of Where Do We Go From Here? (1945), she lost Fred MacMurray to Joan Leslie - but they were reunited (in real life) some years later. Before then, Haver decorated a series of period musicals - mostly set around the turn of the century - which included The Dolly Sisters, Three Little Girls In Blue, Wake Up And Dream, I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now, Look For The Silver Lining, Oh You Beautiful Doll, The Daughter Of Rosie O’Grady and I’ll Get By (1950). The Girl Next Door (1953), in which Haver co-starred with Dan Dailey, was her last film (and one of her best), and the only one with contemporary costumes and setting. Her decision to leave the movie business while she was still at her peak and enter The Sisters of Charity Convent at Xavier, Kansas, in February 1953, was branded by many as a publicity stunt. This conclusion seemed the more credible when she re-emerged into the outside world after only seven and a half months. However, she claimed that she ‘did not have the physical strength to withstand the strain of religious life’, and after meeting up with Fred MacMurray again, and marrying him in June 1954, she has not made another motion picture since. Even that union, in view of the difference in their ages (he was 45, she 28), came in for a fair amount of criticism, but they raised their twin daughters and were still together when MacMurray died in 1991 at the age of 83.