99 and out
Famous folk who didn't quite make their century.
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- American character actress famed for roles as mothers. Born in a Philadelphia suburb as Mary Kennevan, she became a schoolteacher, but soon gave it up for work as an actress in touring companies. She married actor William Carr and toured extensively with his company. After the turn of the century, he became involved in film production as both an actor and director, and he brought Mary and their six children into the film business with him. Mary made her film debut in 1916, but it was her appearance in Over the Hill to the Poorhouse (1920) which made her a success in movies. It was a tremendous success due in large part to her touching portrayal of a poverty-stricken mother. She followed it with similar roles in scores of films throughout the silent period. A fallow period arrived with the talkies, and Carr found herself nearly destitute, but publicity about her status rallied help to her cause and she found help and occasional work. She spent her later years appearing infrequently, often in films directed by her son Thomas Carr. She died at the age of 99 in November 1973.
- Gabrielle Dorziat was born on 15 January 1880 in Épernay, Marne, France. She was an actress, known for Patricia (1942), Samson (1936) and La fin du jour (1939). She was married to Michel de Zogheb. She died on 30 November 1979 in Biarritz, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, France.
- Madoline Thomas was born on 2 January 1890 in Abergavenny, Monmouthshire, Wales, UK. She was an actress, known for No Trace (1950), How Green Was My Valley (1960) and Pride and Prejudice (1958). She was married to John W. H. Thomas. She died on 30 December 1989 in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, England, UK.
- Actress
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Lillian Diana Gish was born on October 14, 1893, in Springfield, Ohio. Her father, James Lee Gish, was an alcoholic who caroused, was rarely at home, and left the family to, more or less, fend for themselves. To help make ends meet, Lillian, her sister Dorothy Gish, and their mother, Mary Gish, a.k.a. Mary Robinson McConnell, tried their hand at acting in local productions. Lillian was six years old when she first appeared in front of an audience. For the next 13 years, she and Dorothy appeared before stage audiences with great success. Had she not made her way into films, Lillian quite possibly could have been one of the great stage actresses of all time; however, she found her way onto the big screen when, in 1912, she met famed director D.W. Griffith. Impressed with what he saw, he immediately cast her in her first film, An Unseen Enemy (1912), followed by The One She Loved (1912) and My Baby (1912). She would make 12 films for Griffith in 1912. With 25 films in the next two years, Lillian's exposure to the public was so great that she fast became one of the top stars in the industry, right alongside Mary Pickford, "America's Sweetheart".
In 1915, Lillian starred as Elsie Stoneman in Griffith's most ambitious project to date, The Birth of a Nation (1915). She was not making the large number of films that she had been in the beginning because she was successful and popular enough to be able to pick and choose the right films to appear in. The following year, she appeared in another Griffith classic, Intolerance (1916). By the early 1920s, her career was on its way down. As with anything else, be it sports or politics, new faces appeared on the scene to replace the "old", and Lillian was no different. In fact, she did not appear at all on the screen in 1922, 1925 or 1929. However, 1926 was her busiest year of the decade with roles in La Bohème (1926) and The Scarlet Letter (1926). As the decade wound to a close, "talkies" were replacing silent films. However, Lillian was not idle during her time away from the screen. She appeared in stage productions, to the acclaim of the public and critics alike. In 1933, she filmed His Double Life (1933), but did not make another film for nine years.
When she returned in 1943, she appeared in two big-budget pictures, Commandos Strike at Dawn (1942) and Top Man (1943). Although these roles did not bring her the attention she had had in her early career, Lillian still proved she could hold her own with the best of them. She earned an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress for her role of Laura Belle McCanles in Duel in the Sun (1946), but lost to Anne Baxter in The Razor's Edge (1946).
One of the most critically acclaimed roles of her career came in the thriller The Night of the Hunter (1955), also notable as the only film directed by actor Charles Laughton. In 1969, she published her autobiography, "The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me". In 1987, she made what was to be her last motion picture, The Whales of August (1987), a box-office success that exposed her to a new generation of fans. Her 75-year career is almost unbeatable in any field, let alone the film industry. On February 27, 1993, at age 99, Lillian Gish died peacefully in her sleep at her Manhattan apartment in New York City. She never married.- Actor
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A graduate of the University of Minnesota, Eddie Albert was a circus trapeze flier before becoming a stage and radio actor. He made his film debut in 1938 and has worked steadily since, often cast as the friendly, good-natured buddy of the hero but occasionally being cast as a villain; one of his most memorable roles was as the cowardly, glory-seeking army officer in Robert Aldrich's World War 2 film, Attack (1956).- Actress
- Soundtrack
In British films of the 1930s and 1940s, American-born singer Elisabeth Welch made several memorable guest appearances in cabaret sequences, and starred opposite Paul Robeson in two features. Sophisticated, glamorous and charming, her appearances were a refreshing departure from the stereotype of black women perpetuated by Hollywood films of that time. One of her best screen roles was Beulah, the nightclub owner and hostess, in Ealing's Dead of Night (1945). After a long and distinguished career in West End musical theater, Elisabeth returned to the screen in 1979, making a memorable appearance as "A Goddess" in Derek Jarman's The Tempest (1979), singing her theme song, "Stormy Weather".- Director
- Actor
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Vincent Sherman was born on 16 July 1906 in Vienna, Georgia, USA. He was a director and actor, known for Affair in Trinidad (1952), Counsellor at Law (1933) and All Through the Night (1942). He was married to Hedda Comoraw. He died on 18 June 2006 in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA.- Art Department
- Actor
- Additional Crew
Al Hirschfeld was born on 21 June 1903 in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. He was an actor, known for Fantasia 2000 (1999), Heroes of Comedy (1995) and Rhapsody in Blue (2000). He was married to Louise Kerz, Dolly Haas and Florence Ruth Hobby. He died on 20 January 2003 in New York City, New York, USA.- The man responsible for awarding the coveted Holiday Magazine Restaurant awards has been a wine writer for more than 65 years. He has also been a retailer, an artist, an actor, a restaurateur and even a flight instructor, during World War II. He is also a Buddhist monk.
Robert Lawrence Balzer has always been surrounded by Hollywood celebrities and in 1978 he teamed with producer Duke Goldstone and director - writer Dennis F. Stevens to produce a number of wine programs and commercials featuring the leading wineries of France and California.
As of this writing he has a daily radio program on K-Mozart (105.1 FM in Los Angeles) and is still leading wine programs on cruise ships.
Robert Lawrence Balzer was also the first serious writer-journalist in America. His love affair with wine began with Repeal, about the time he graduated Stanford and joined Balzer's, the family gourmet market on Larchmont Boulevard, just south of Paramount Studios, not far from the heart of Hollywood and mere miles from Beverly Hills. Customers included Cecil DeMille, Alfred Hitchcock, Ingrid Bergman, and Marlon Brando.
In 1936, at the age of 24, Robert Lawrence was put in charge of the market's wine department. At the time, he knew nothing about wine, but soon learned. California wines were beginning to find their way onto retail shelves, after Prohibition's 13-year dry spell.
Balzer put out a customer newsletter praising the wines stocked on the shelves of the Larchmont store; Almaden, Inglenook, and Paul Mason. Will Rogers Jr., a classmate at Stanford, was intrigued by Balzer's writing and in 1937 asked him to write a wine column for his newspaper, the Beverly Hills Citizen.
After writing the first of his 11 books on wine, Robert Lawrence began branching out. He started writing for Travel Holiday magazine, which published his articles for more than two decades and until recently Balzer was the person responsible for granting the coveted Holiday Magazine Restaurant awards. In 1964, he began writing a weekly column for the Los Angles Times Magazine. A few years later, he launched Robert Lawrence Balzer's Private Guide to Food and Wine, quite likely the first wine newsletter in America.
Robert Lawrence also has a spiritual side. Since the early `50s he has studied Buddhism, at one time at a temple in Cambodia where he was ordained a teaching monk. Indeed, teaching may be his greatest passion. Over the years winemakers have made regular pilgrimages to speak to Balzer's classes, which have developed an almost cult like following among students.
At his annual birthday parties, those lucky enough to be invited mingle with owners of the world's greatest wineries, who fly to Southern California, and the City of Tustin, for the event. - A beautiful and durable actress of screen, stage and television, Asherson was born Renée Ascherson in London (dropping the "c" early in her acting career), the younger daughter of Charles Ascherson, a businessman and bibliophile of German-Jewish extraction, and his second wife, Dorothy Wiseman, who wed on 14 December 1910. (Her older sister was Janet Elizabeth Ascherson, born 22 May 1914).
Asherson's parents narrowly avoided being passengers on the fateful maiden voyage of the Titanic in 1912, after Charles Ascherson reportedly canceled the passage due to suffering from appendicitis.
She played the bride of Laurence Olivier's title character in Henry V (1944) (Henry V (1944)). She later appeared in Maniacs on Wheels (1949), a speedway drama with Dirk Bogarde. A frequent co-star of the actor Robert Donat, whom she married in 1953. The couple separated in 1956, but were due to reconcile at the time of his untimely death in London on 9th June 1958, aged 53. - African American actress Juanita Moore entered films in the early 1950s, a time in which few black people were given an opportunity to act in major studio films. Fortunately Moore's roles began improving as Hollywood developed a social consciousness toward the end of the decade. In 1959 she received an Academy Award nomination for her performance in Imitation of Life (1959), a glossy updating of a once controversial Fannie Hurst novel about racism. Within the next decade Hollywood underwent several sociological upheavals, and Juanita was one of the beneficiaries. She became a fixture in black-oriented films of the 1960s and 1970s, appearing in such films as Uptight (1968), Thomasine & Bushrod (1974) and Abby (1974). She also appeared in Walt Disney Pictures' The Kid (2000), and was in a total of more than 50 films. Moore retired in 2001 and passed away New Year's Day 2014 . She was 99.
- Cinematographer
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- Producer
A British filmmaker who, over the years, worked as assistant director, cinematographer, producer, writer and ultimately director, Ronald Neame was born on April 23, 1911. His father, Elwin Neame, was a film director and his mother, Ivy Close, was a film star. During the 1920s, he started working at famous Elstree Studios. One of his first jobs was assistant cameraman for Alfred Hitchcock on Blackmail (1929), the first talking picture made in England.
Neame became a cinematographer during the 1930s. In 1942, he and sound designer C.C. Stevens received a special effect Oscar nomination for One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942), a film by the Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger team. In 1944, after working together on In Which We Serve (1942), Neame, David Lean and producer Anthony Havelock-Allan formed a production company, Cineguild. The screenplays for its films Brief Encounter (1945) and Great Expectations (1946) received best writing Oscar nominations.
After a fall-out with Lean and the demise of Cineguild in 1947, Neame turned to directing with Take My Life (1947). As a director, he would be quite versatile, touching genres like comedy (The Promoter (1952), Hopscotch (1980)), psychological studies (The Chalk Garden (1964)), musical (Scrooge (1970)), thriller (The Odessa File (1974)) and even disaster movies (The Poseidon Adventure (1972), the one that started the trend, produced by Irwin Allen). Under Neame's guidance, Alec Guinness won the best actor trophee at the 1958 Venice festival for The Horse's Mouth (1958), a comedy based on a book adapted by Guinness himself. Two years later, John Mills received the same award for Tunes of Glory (1960), also directed by Neame. In 1969, Maggie Smith got her first Oscar for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) under Neame's direction, and in 1970, Albert Finney got his first Golden Globe for his role in Neame's "Scrooge".
In 1996, Neane was awarded Commander of the Order of the British Empire in recognition for his contributions to the film industry. In 2003, he published his autobiography, "Straight from the Horse's Mouth". Keeping up the family tradition, his son Christopher Neame is a movie producer and his grandson, Gareth Neame, works for the BBC. Ronald Neame died at age 99 of complications from a fall on June 16, 2010 in Los Angeles, California.- Mary Wynn was born on 13 March 1902 in San Francisco, California, USA. She was an actress, known for The Power Divine (1923), Shattered Idols (1922) and The Frame-Up (1923). She was married to Josef Rosenfeld. She died on 22 December 2001 in Calabasas, California, USA.
- Actress
- Costume and Wardrobe Department
- Additional Crew
Marie Osborne was born on 5 November 1911 in Denver, Colorado, USA. She was an actress, known for Milady o' the Beanstalk (1918), Twin Kiddies (1917) and The Godfather Part II (1974). She was married to Murray F. Yeats and Frank J. Dempsey. She died on 11 November 2010 in San Clemente, California, USA.- Music Department
- Actor
- Producer
A graduate of the Eastman School of Music and a classically trained oboist, Mitch Miller first entered the pop music scene in 1948 at Mercury Records, where he guided such acts as Vic Damone, Frankie Laine and Patti Page to success. In 1950 he was lured by Goddard Lieberson to Columbia Records as that label's A&R director, where he made stars out of Tony Bennett, Johnnie Ray, Guy Mitchell and many others. Miller himself first shot to prominence in the late 1950s with his "Sing Along" series of albums, which ultimately led to his own series, Sing Along with Mitch (1961). His opposition to rock and roll, however, undercut Columbia's market position for several years until after he left the label in 1965. In recent years he has occasionally served as a guest conductor for symphony orchestras across the country.- Actress
- Producer
French actress Renée Saint-Cyr became synonymous with chic comedy and costumed drama, enjoying major success for nearly seven decades before her death after an attack of bronchitis at age 99. Over the years she equipped herself well opposite the established talents of Raymond Rouleau, Jules Berry, Raimu, Noël-Noël, Harry Baur, Pierre Brasseur and Paul Meurisse.
Born Marie Louise Eugénie Vittore on November 16, 1904, and the daughter of a hotel owner and opera singer, Renée was a one-time model who married Charles Leopold Lautner (1894-1938), a wealthy man, at age 21 before entering the acting leagues. After studies at a drama school in Marseilles, she made her film bow starring as one of The Two Orphans (1933) co-starring Rosine Deréan, based on the Gish sisters' silent classic Orphans of the Storm (1921). She took on Lillian's role and would adopt the moniker of Saint-Cyr, supposedly taken from a beloved canine.
Saint-Cyr's alluring beauty, patrician demeanor, and comedic skills gave her great momentum co-starring in such chic 1930's film comedies as Toto (1933), D'amour et d'eau fraîche (1933), Une fois dans la vie (1934) (Once in a Lifetime), Le dernier milliardaire (1934), Paris (1937), L'école des cocottes (1935), Donogoo (1936), Paris (1937) and The Pearls of the Crown (1937), as well as the dramas 27 rue de la Paix (1936) and Marked Girls (1938).
Renée also graced the stage during this time in a production of "The Threepenny Opera," among others. She nixed an offer to sign with 20th Century-Fox, but did star in England's Strange Boarders (1938) and Italy's Red Roses (1940) (Red Roses) co-starring Vittorio De Sica. Into the 1940s war years, she starred in such popular film vehicles as the Hector Berlioz biopic La symphonie fantastique (1942) (The Fantastic Symphony), the title dramatic roles in Marie-Martine (1943) and Paméla (1945), plus Pierre et Jean (1943), Étrange destin (1946) and L'insaisissable Frédéric (1946).
Saint-Cyr left films after shooting The Knight of the Night (1953), Il cavaliere di Maison Rouge (1954) (The Glorious Avenger) (as Marie Antoinette) and Si Paris nous était conté (1956) (as Empress Eugénie}, but returned into the next decade with Coctail party (1960) and Lafayette (1962). By this time, her only child, Georges Lautner, had become an influential film writer and director and had begun churning out a series of standard genre movies that occasionally featured Renee in the cast. Such films included The Monocle (1964), Fleur d'oseille (1967), Quelques messieurs trop tranquilles (1973), Now We've Seen It All! (1976), Ils sont fous ces sorciers (1978), My Other Husband (1983), Room Service (1992).- Ethel Kenyon was born on 17 June 1904 in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA. She was an actress, known for Branded (1931), By Whose Hand? (1932) and June Moon (1931). She was married to Ernest Victor Heyn, Charles Butterworth and A. Edward Sutherland. She died on 22 January 2004 in New York City, New York, USA.
- Actor, jazz musician and stand-up comedian Jack LeMaire, who got his start in vaudeville, died Oct. 18 in North Hollywood, Calif., of natural causes. He was 99.
LeMaire toured with Bob Hope and Johnny Grant doing stand-up for USO shows, ending each set with a song on his guitar. His passion for playing occasionally overshadowed his love of comedy, and he can be heard on recordings with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, who nicknamed LeMaire "Chords."
LeMaire started working vaudeville as a toddler with his father, George, in "The Ziegfeld Follies," and soon moved on to film work, making 33 silent comedies with Pathe.
Among his other credits were 1958 TV series "Mac King," 1959's "The Lawless Years" and "Bat Masterson" plus 1964's "The Farmer's Daughters."
Later in life, LeMaire appeared as Colonel Sanders in a number of KFC advertisements. Just last year, he performed in a sketch on "The Tonight Show" with Jay Leno.
Survivors include a son, two daughters, five grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. - Make-Up Department
Chances are, if you saw a movie with one of the stars of the 1930s or 1940s, her hair was done by Carmen Dirigo, who passed away on July 25 in Van Nuys at the age of 99.
Dirigo, born Daisy Obradowits, was a prominent hair and wig stylist in Hollywood's Golden Age, working at the various studios and later in television. Among her stable of stars were Joan Bennett, Yvonne De Carlo, Joan Fontaine and her sister, Olivia de Havilland, Ann Blyth, Elena Verdugo, and many others.
She was born in New York on December 30, 1907 and moved with her mother Lilley to Southern California in the 1920s. Soon after, Lilley started a beauty shop on Cahuenga in Hollywood while Carmen went to school. But the younger Dirigo had show business dreams. From an early age, she worked as a dancer at the Egyptian, Chinese, and Pantages theaters doing prologue shows before feature films ran.
At Carmen's urging, Lilley finally attempted to get into the movie business during the last years of the silents. "I kept after her, but she was very shy," Carmen recalled in 1999. "One day, she went and made an appointment at Universal with Carl Laemmle and she sold him on the idea of having a hairstylist established on the lot. She told him that she once saw a picture where the actress is out in the rain, and when she comes in, her hair is all dry. She told him that he could have someone established on each picture to read the script and follow the story and do it accordingly. He thought that was brilliant, and that's how it all started."
By 1933, after taking a state test to get her cosmetology license, Carmen followed her mother and entered the hairstyling field, first working at United Artists. After four years, she moved to Paramount where she first worked with stars like Fontaine and Fredric March. Eight years later, she came to Universal as head of hairstyling, where her mother had broken ground working with legendary makeup artist Jack Pierce, famous for Universal's slate of classic monster films.
Of the rapid pace of the classic studio days, Carmen remembered the structured approach to the work. "They didn't have time to talk about stuff then," she said. "We would get there early, and have to rush to get people out on time. If I had wigs to do, I'd have to be there at 6:30AM and take the wigs off the block. Max Factor's on Highland and three wigmakers out of Universal would ventilate the wigs. Then, I would style them the night before."
One of her biggest challenges at Universal was the 1948 film, Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid which featured underwater photography of star Ann Blyth. "The producer wanted her hair to look as beautiful underwater as out of the water.," she recalled. "I had to get together with a chemist to figure out what we could use that would be pliable in the water. For days, before the picture started, I would be in my department with a fishbowl, and I'd have a hunk of hair which I waved first and sprayed with this chemical. I'd plunk it in the water and swish it around and see if it held the curl. When it did, I knew that it was okay."
While at Universal, Dirigo served as president of the Cinema Hairstylists, an elite association, and was the first hairstylist in the business to get screen credit. In 1951, the nascent television medium beckoned, and she moved to TV on shows including Fireside Theater, which ran until 1955. Around that time,, she did several episodes a CBS show called You Are There, which recreated significant moments from history. For an episode which aired in April, 1955, using wigs and makeup, she and Jack Pierce transformed actor Jeff Morrow into Abraham Lincoln for a staged recreation of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.
Dirigo's last job in the business was as hairstyling department head for TV's Petticoat Junction, where she worked until 1970. She retired to her house on Coldwater Canyon Boulevard in Van Nuys where she lived the rest of her life. Until a severe fall at home in 2000 left her partially immobilized, Dirigo was an avid equestrian and enjoyed watching her Academy screeners on VHS tapes. She leaves behind no living heirs.
Her legacy, along with her mother's, was creating firm aesthetics for women's hairstyles in films that remains to this day. One Universal press release from 1946 stated: "She is a firm believer in frequent hair style changes and in the choice of simple styles for business and sportswear. Elaborate hairstyles should be created only for evening and formal occasions, she recommends."- Camera and Electrical Department
- Director
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Eve Arnold was born on 21 April 1912 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. She was a director and writer, known for The World About Us (1967), Behind the Veil (1973) and Love, Marilyn (2012). She was married to Arnold Arnold. She died on 4 January 2012 in London, England, UK.- Vivian Tobin was born on 12 August 1902 in New York City, New York, USA. She was an actress, known for The Sign of the Cross (1932), This Man Is Mine (1934) and The Jitters (1938). She was married to Karl O. Von Hagen. She died on 6 August 2002 in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, USA.
- Producer
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Norman Felton was born on 29 April 1913 in London, England, UK. He was a producer and director, known for The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015), The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964) and Robert Montgomery Presents (1950). He was married to Aline Scotts. He died on 25 June 2012 in Santa Barbara, California, USA.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Director
Gilbert Taylor was born on 21 April 1914 in Bushey Heath, Hertfordshire, England, UK. He was a cinematographer and director, known for Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977), Flash Gordon (1980) and The Omen (1976). He was married to Dee Vaughan and Eileen Donnelly. He died on 23 August 2013 in Newport, Isle of Wight, England, UK.- Actress
- Additional Crew
- Soundtrack
Denise Grey was born on 17 September 1896 in Chatillon, Valle d'Aosta, Italy. She was an actress, known for The Party 2 (1982), The Party (1980) and Devil in the Flesh (1947). She was married to Charles Henri Dunkel. She died on 13 January 1996 in Paris, France.- Actress
- Soundtrack
One of the great voices of the Metropolitan Opera, New York-born mezzo-soprano Rise (pronounced REE-za) Stevens made her debut with the company in 1939 as Octavian in Richard Strauss's "Der Rosenkavalier" in a tour performance in Philadelphia. Her other notable roles in 21 years with the company included the two characterizations most associated with her, the title role in Bizet's "Carmen" and Dalila in Saint-Saens's "Samson et Dalila," Laura in Ponchielli's "La Gioconda," Marfa in Mussorgsky's "Khovanschina," Prince Orlofsky in Johann Strauss's "Die Fledermaus," and Hansel in Humperdinck's "Hansel und Gretel." A great beauty as well as a great singer, she enjoyed one of the more successful careers of the many opera singers who made films, most notably in "The Chocolate Soldier" opposite Nelson Eddy and "Going My Way" with Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald. She was also something of a fixture on early TV, appearing frequently on such programs as "The Bell Telephone Hour" and "The Voice of Firestone," where she sang both operatic arias and popular songs. She also appeared on one of the first telecasts from the Met, in 1954, singing Carmen opposite one of her most frequent Don Joses, Richard Tucker.
Since her retirement from opera in 1960, she has continued to play a very active role in the New York fine arts scene. In 1964, she inaugurated the Music Theater of Lincoln Center as Anna Leonowens in a well-received revival of "The King and I," produced by Richard Rodgers, opposite Darren McGavin 's King. Also that year, she became director of the Metropolitan Opera National Company, a touring company which served as a training ground for promising young singers and conductors, many of whom (Marilyn Niska, Ron Boettcher) became members of the regular company. She held this job for three years, until the company ceased operations when the Met could no longer afford to finance it. Since then, she has remained active with the Met as a long-time official of the Metropolitan Opera Guild.
Married to actor Walter Szurovy from 1939 until his death in 2001, their only child is the actor Nicolas Surovy. She continues to live in New York, as active and charming as ever.