June Knight: Movies & Box Office

June Knight, born Margaret Rose Valliquietto on January 22, 1913, in Los Angeles, California, was an American theatre actress, film actress, dancer, and singer whose career spanned from 1930 to 1947. Despite a challenging start to life, having been diagnosed with tuberculosis at age four and contracting polio that left her unable to walk until she was five, Knight defied medical expectations and went on to become a celebrated performer on stage and screen. She began performing songs and dance publicly at the age of ten, showing early promise that would later blossom into a remarkable career in entertainment. Valliquietto adopted the stage name June Knight when she first partnered with dancer John Holland, taking on the professional moniker of his previous dance partner. At just nineteen years of age, she appeared in the last Ziegfeld Follies show, Hot-Cha! (1932), and went on to feature in four other Broadway productions including Take A Chance (1932), Jubilee (1935) — where she introduced the Cole Porter classic "Begin the Beguine" — The Would-Be Gentleman (1946), and Sweethearts (1947). Knight also had a short-lived but notable film career, appearing in twelve films from 1930 to 1940, most memorably in Broadway Melody of 1936 (1935), in which she sang the hit song "I've Got a Feelin' You're Foolin'" alongside co-star Robert Taylor. Her personal life was marked by four marriages: first to Palm Beach stockbroker Paul Ames in 1934, which lasted just nine days before he petitioned for divorce; then to Texas oilman Arthur A. Cameron in 1938; later to Lockheed Aircraft Corporation co-founder Carl B. Squier in 1949, whose previous wife had died in a plane crash eleven years earlier; and finally to Squier's Lockheed colleague and friend Jack Buehler in 1969. In 1935, Knight was infamously bound, gagged, and robbed of jewelry in her nineteenth-story New York apartment by two men who posed as film executives, an incident that shocked the entertainment world at the time. She passed away on June 16, 1987, at the age of 74, following complications from a stroke, and was laid to rest at Pierce Brothers Valhalla Memorial Park in Los Angeles. In recognition of her enduring contributions to the motion picture industry, Knight received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on February 3, 1960.