June 12, 1963 - Actress Dolores Hart (pictured), who once said “90% of success in show business is God-given,” renounced one of the screen’s most promising careers today to become a Roman Catholic nun. Her press representative made the announcement after the 24-year-old actress — who appeared with Elvis Presley in her first movie, “Loving You” (1957) — already had entered a Connecticut convent, where she has been accepted as a postulant. Miss Hart, a 1948 convert to the Catholic faith, was quoted as telling a friend, “I am not leaving anyone or anything behind. I am taking a full and grateful heart with me.” Miss Hart had been a professional actress for only five years. Yet in that time she co-starred in such major films as “Wild Is the Wind,” “King Creole,” “Where the Boys Are,” and “St. Francis of Assisi,” in which she played a nun. Last year, she broke her engagement to Los Angeles businessman Don Robinson, but a friend said that had nothing to do with her decision to become a nun. The friend said Miss Hart had felt for many years that she had a religious vocation but thought she would be rejected as a postulant. Although show business success came with intoxicating swiftness, Miss Hart remained a quiet, introspective girl. “Sometimes,” she once told an interviewer, “I think I’m too solemn and don’t go along enough with the philosophy that says live and enjoy life right now. But that’s the way I am.”
