Kathryn Grayson

She was nominated for an Emmy in 1955 for her performance as a blind girl in General Electric Theater's Shadow On The Heart.. On January 6, 1969 the twins were found dead in their home due to the Hong Kong Flu. She left the movies in 1956 for the stage and fulfilled her dream of being in opera. Their tour manager failed to pick them up and they had to take a job at a grocery store. She also played Magnolia in the 1951 version of Show Boat. The Hiltons' last public appearance was at a drive-in movie theater in Charlotte, North Carolina. Some consider her role as Lili Vanessi in Kiss Me, Kate as her best. In the 1950 they tried Hollywood again and starred in a movie Chained for Life.

She started out with dreams of being in opera, but MGM scooped her up to be in films. Eventually the sisters settled in Miami and kept a hamburger stand called the Hilton Sisters' Snack Bar. The petite soprano was one of MGM Studios' top sopranos of the 1940s & 1950s. In 1932 the twins appeared as themselves in the movie Freaks. She has one daughter. As if to compensate for their deprived past, they had numerous affairs, failed attempts to get a marriage license and couple of short marriages. She married twice, first to actor John Shelton, second to actor/singer Johnnie Johnston. Daisy dyed her hair blonde and they began to wear different outfits so they could be told apart.

Kathryn Grayson (born February 9, 1922) is an American actress and singer who was born Zelma Kathryn Hedrick. They left the sideshows and went into vaudeville as "The Hilton Sisters' Revue". In 1931 the sisters gathered enough courage to sue their "managers", gaining $100.000 in damages - and independence. They lived in a mansion in San Antonio, Texas until the early 1930s. They kept the twins from public view for a while and trained them in jazz music.

When Mary died in Birmingham, Alabama, her daughter and her husband took over. Their controllers kept all the money the sisters earned. In the true sideshow manner, their performance was accompanied with a dubious "history". Mary Hilton dragged them to a tour through Germany, Australia and to the USA.

The Hilton sisters toured first in England at the age of three as "the United Twins". They trained them in singing and dancing. According to the sisters' own autobiography, Mary Hilton, her husband and daughter kept the twins in strict control with physical abuse; they had to call her "Auntie Lou" and her current husband "Sir". Skinner's boss Mary Hilton, who helped in childbirth, apparently saw commercial prospects in them, effectively bought them from their mother and took them under her care.

The sisters were born conjoined in hips and buttocks; they shared blood circulation and were fused at the pelvis but shared no major organs. Their mother was a single barmaid named Kate Skinner. Daisy and Violet Hilton were born in Brighton, England on February 5, 1908. The Hilton twins were a pair of conjoined twins who toured in the US sideshow and vaudeville circuit in the 1930's.