Julie Wilson

Cabaret singer and musical theater star Julie Wilson was born in Omaha, NE, in 1924, the daughter of Russell Wilson, a coal salesman, and Emily Bennett Wilson, who became a hairdresser. She displayed an interest in theater and music in her youth and began singing with local bands at the age of 14. She enrolled at Omaha University, majoring in drama with a minor in music, but dropped out when she successfully auditioned to replace an ailing performer in a road tour of the musical revue Earl Carroll's Vanities that had come to town. She stayed with the tour six months, leaving when it got to New York in the spring of 1943. In New York, she embarked on a career as a nightclub singer that led to engagements at prestigious clubs such as the Latin Quarter and the Copacabana. She also occasionally sang with big bands such as those of Johnny Long and Emil Stern. She made it to Broadway as an understudy in the 1946 revue Three to Make Ready. She spent much of the late '40s on the West Coast, performing in such clubs as the Mocambo in Los Angles and the Mark Hopkins in San Francisco. She replaced Lisa Kirk as the second female lead in Cole Porter's Kiss Me, Kate on Broadway in 1949, was a member of the national touring company from 1949 to 1951, and on March 8, 1951, opened in the London production, which ran for 501 performances. Along with other members of the cast, she made recordings of the show's songs for the English Columbia label. (She also appeared in an American television production of Kiss Me, Kate in 1958.) She starred in the London musical Bet Your Life (February 18, 1952), which ran for 361 performances and produced a cast album on the English Columbia label, and she replaced Mary Martin in the starring role in the London production of Rodgers & Hammerstein's South...