The peak of Rosemary Clooney's musical career intersected the golden age of musicals in Hollywood. Like most popular singers of the era, she was drafted for silver-screen duty, and in 1954 and 1955 she appeared in a handful of frothy comedies for Paramount Pictures.

        In her autobiography Girl Singer, Ms. Clooney recalled that her musical mentor, Mitch Miller, tried to dissuade her from signing a contract for the kind of mediocre formula movies that studios then turned out factory-style.

        She went ahead anyway, she said, because she thought it would be fun and give her more in common with her soon-to-be husband, the actor Jose Ferrer.

        Most of her movies were like her first, The Stars Are Singing (1953), a forgettable musical revue co-starring Anna Maria Alberghetti.

        The same year, she co-starred with Bob Hope in Here Come the Girls, a movie that Ms. Clooney described as “flimsy.”

        In 1954, she appeared in a curiosity called Red Garters, a stylized musical Western, directed by studio veteran George Marshall (Destry Rides Again), that co-starred Buddy Ebsen, Gene Barry and Jack Carson. Though better received than her earlier films, it was less than a classic.

        But a classic did lay ahead for the singer — in her last major role in a major film. The movie was White Christmas, a lush Technicolor musical remake of 1942's Holiday Inn. Both starred Bing Crosby; the 1954 version also featured Danny Kaye and Vera-Ellen in a splashy, sentimental favorite destined to outshine the original.

        The movie remains immensely popular even now. For example, it has been part of a special holiday double-bill (with It's A Wonderful Life)at Chicago's Music Box Theatre for 18 years.

        In the past several years, Music Box programmer Brian Andreotti says, audiences have spontaneously begun singing along during the movie's musical numbers.

        After White Christmas, Ms. Clooney made only one more studio film, playing a small role in MGM's Deep in My Heart (1954), which starred Mr. Ferrer as composer Sigmund Romberg. Forty years later, she made another cameo appearance in Radioland Murders.

        “Everybody said White Christmas was only the beginning of my brilliant career” in movies, Ms. Clooney wrote. “As it happened, everybody was wrong.”

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