A reigning teen star of the late 1950s and early 60s, whose pert innocence and saucy yet virginal sweetness struck a nerve with the pre-sexual revolution's youth audience until a more-knowning kind of twentysomething--the Tuesday Welds and Ann-Margrets--came to the fore. A successful child model from the age of ten, the petite, twinkly-eyed blonde Dee made her film debut in "Until They Sail" in 1957 and starred in a series of popular romantic comedies ("Gidget" 1959) and melodramas ("Imitation of Life", "A Summer Place" both 1959, "Portrait in Black" 1960) usually as a good girl on the brink
