Dolores Hart, O.S.B., was an American Roman Catholic Benedictine nun and actress who was born Dolores Hicks on October 20, 1938. She did 10 films in five years after her cinematic debut with Elvis Presley in Loving You (1957), including Wild is the Wind (1957), King Creole (1958), and Where the Boys Are (1959).
By the early 1960s, she had established herself as a leading lady, and she ‘stunned Hollywood’ when she announced that she would give up her career to join the Abbey of Regina Laudis convent in Connecticut, where she serves her monastic community.
She was born Dolores Hicks, the only child of actor Bert Hicks and actress Harriett Hicks, who divorced when she was three years old. ‘ I was precocious as a child'” she said. My parents married when they were 16 and 17 years old, and they were both stunning women.
Hicks was also connected to singer Mario Lanza through an aunt’s marriage. She grew up in Chicago with her grandparents, who enrolled her in a parochial school, St. Gregory Catholic School, not because of its religious teaching, but because it was the closest to their home, and my grandparents didn’t want me to get run over by streetcars,’ she explained.
Hicks became a Catholic when she was ten years old. By the age of 11, she was back in Beverly Hills, this time with her mother, a restaurant greeter who had married restaurant owner Al Gordon. She went to Marymount College after high school. In 1956, she was contracted to play a supporting role as Elvis Presley’s love interest in the 1957 film Loving You, using the stage name ‘Dolores Hart.’
In 1960, Hart starred in Where the Boys Are, an adolescent comedy about college students on spring break that became something of a cult hit. Hart plays a co-ed who battles to define herself when faced with her newly discovered sexuality and popularity with the opposite sex in the movie.
God Is the Bigger Elvis, a documentary film chronicling Hart’s life, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2012 and shown on HBO in April 2012. Hart’s last red-carpet Oscar event as a Hollywood actress was in 1959 when she attended the Academy Awards for the documentary.
Also READ: Which Hollywood movie producer jumped off a bridge?
