Me, I'm good at nothing but walking on the set with a pretty dress.

According to her son's book Dee was born in 1944 but having begun modeling and acting at a very young age Sandra Dee and her mother falsely inflated her age by two years so Sandra Dee could find more work. In popular culture
One of the popular songs of the Broadway musical and 1978 movie Grease is "Look at Me I'm Sandra Dee" in which the rebellious Rizzo satirizes new girl Sandy's clean cut image likened to Sandra Dee's. In a 1959 interview Dee recalled that Sandra Dee "grew up fast" surrounded mostly by older people and was "never held back in anything [Sandra Dee] wanted to do.

She rarely acted after this time and her final years were marred by illness; Sandra Dee died of complications from kidney disease in 2005. Dee began her career as a model and progressed to film. By the late 1960s her career had started to decline and a highly publicized marriage to Bobby Darin ended in divorce.