Gladys Swarthout was best known as a singer in the classical field, but she occasionally delved into lighter popular fare. Born and raised in Deepwater, MO, she was the daughter of a railroad conductor. The family had at least two highly musical children, and Gladys and her sister Romah Lee both took singing lessons as young girls -- Gladys impressed those around her with her depth and range. In her early teens, she presented herself as 19 and was engaged as a contralto at a church in Kansas City. She studied classical music almost exclusively, and attended the Bush Conservatory of Music in Chicago, later joining the Chicago Civic Opera Company, where she found a mentor in Mary Garden. She was later engaged by the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and made her debut there in 1929, as La Cieca in +La Gioconda. She gave regular performances on the radio during the 1930s as well as on the operatic stage, and appeared in a handful of movies. She was signed to Paramount Pictures in the mid-'30s, and worked in five feature films, including #Rose of the Rancho and #Champagne Waltz.

On record, her repertory went beyond the classics to encompass the work of George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, and Richard Rodgers; she recorded at least one 78-rpm pop album featuring standards by those composers for RCA Victor. Swarthout continued working into the early '50s, just late enough to have made some television appearances (including one as a guest on #What's My Line). Swarthout's health began declining as she reached her fifties, a result of complications from rheumatic heart fever that she'd had -- undiagnosed -- as a child. She was forced into retirement but survived, thanks to then-new techniques of open-heart surgery. She devoted a good part of the last decade of her life to a campaign to raise awareness among parents about childhood rheumatic heart fever. She passed away in 1969 at the age of 68. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi