Twentieth Century Fox was created in 1935 by the merger of two important studios who were struggling financially—Fox Film Corporation and Twentieth Century Pictures. The new studio produced many ground-breaking films over the next thirty years, including All About Eve, which was nominated for more Academy Awards than any other film in Hollywood history (12), Cleopatra, which had the dubious distinction of being the most expensive film ever made, and The Sound of Music, probably the most successful film ever made. But the studio’s success was established with a series of film biographies and musicals (the two forms often combined), utilizing three female stars who were their leading assets—Shirley Temple and Alice Faye in the 1930s and Betty Grable and Faye in the 1940s. Faye, Grable and June Haver were often referred to as the “Fox Blondes.”