Biographie
A striking champagne blonde with green eyes and a husky voice, she was born Darlyne Danielle Swanson in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her family relocated to California when she was five, where she received her education and later attended the University of California, Berkeley. At sixteen, she married a Frenchman named Donalde Crayne, but the marriage ended in divorce about four years later. Aspiring to enter show business, Dani took lessons in dance, voice, and acting, eventually becoming a mambo instructor at a Hollywood dance academy. There, a Universal Studios talent scout discovered her and signed her to a one-year contract. Despite significant publicity, Dani appeared in only a few films, and her career remained unremarkable. After her contract was not renewed in 1956, she appeared in a couple of Warner Brothers films. The first, the low-budget western Shoot-Out at Medicine Bend (1957), showcased her as a racketeer's girlfriend. She then portrayed Helen of Troy in the lavish but critically and commercially unsuccessful The Story of Mankind (1957), which critics described as a "disconnected, clichéd pageant." Dani did not appear on screen again until the late 1970s, when she returned briefly as a character actress under the name Dani Janssen.
In the early 1960s, Dani Crayne married singer Buddy Greco after seeing him perform at a Chicago club. They divorced in 1974, after which she married TV star David Janssen, known for The Fugitive (1963), who gifted her a racing green 1979 Rolls-Royce Corniche. Following Janssen's death in 1980, she was briefly a widow. From 1981 to 1987, her fourth husband was actor-director-stuntman Hal Needham.
A renowned Beverly Hills hostess known for lavish Oscar night parties, Dani made savvy investments that allowed her to enjoy an extravagant lifestyle—one writer compared her to a "typical Jackie Collins character"—without ever needing to work again.
