Elaine Stritch

Actress/singer Elaine Stritch had a long career in the theater, in films, and on television. She gained her greatest prominence as a stage performer, alternating leading roles in straight plays and musicals in New York, London, and on tour. Before the camera, she tended to be cast in supporting roles, and in addition to a series of movies she was also a regular on several television series and a frequent guest star, one of those performances winning her an Emmy Award. At the start of the 21st century, she gathered up her personal and professional experiences and recounted them in a one-woman show, Elaine Stritch: At Liberty, that finally won her a Tony Award. Stritch grew up in Michigan, given a strict Catholic upbringing that included attendance at a convent school. But she became interested in acting early on and moved to New York in her teens to study drama at the New School for Social Research. She began getting parts in plays in 1944 and made her Broadway debut in the musical revue Angel in the Wings (December 11, 1947) singing the hit novelty song "Civilization (Bongo, Bongo, Bongo)." The show ran over 300 performances, after which Stritch was a regular on two short-lived television series in 1949, The Growing Paynes and Jack Carter and Company, then appeared again on Broadway in the play Yes, M'Lord. Although she was only in her mid-twenties, she could play older roles convincingly, and this helped her to get parts that might have seemed too old for her. (For example, in 1951, she was the understudy to Ethel Merman in Irving Berlin's musical Call Me Madam in the starring role of a mature society hostess.) Stritch next appeared on Broadway in a featured role in the successful revival of the Rodgers & Hart musical Pal Joey (January 3, 1952), and she made her...