Nanette Fabray
Nanette Fabray | |
|---|---|
| Born | Ruby Bernadette Nanette Fabares |
| Occupation | Actress |
| Years active | 1924–1994 |
| Spouse(s) | Dave Tebet (1947-1951) Ranald MacDougall (1957-1973) |
Nanette Fabray (born October 27, 1920) is an American actress, comedienne, singer, dancer, and activist. She began her career performing in vaudeville as a child and then became a highly praised musical theatre actress during the 1940s and 1950s, winning a Tony Award in 1949 for her performance in Love Life. She became a household name during the mid 1950s as comedy partner to Sid Caesar on Caesar's Hour for which she won three Emmy Awards. From 1979-1984 she starred as Grandma Katherine Romano on One Day at a Time.[1]
Fabray overcame a significant hearing impairment to pursue her career and has been a long-time advocate for the rights of the deaf and hard of hearing. Her honors representing the handicapped include the President's Distinguished Service Award and the Eleanor Roosevelt Humanitarian Award. She is the aunt of actress/singer Shelley Fabares.[1]
Early life, education, and work as a child actor
Fabray was born as Ruby Bernadette Nanette Fabares in San Diego, California to Raul Bernard Fabares, a train conductor, and Lily Agnes McGovern, a housewife. The family resided in Los Angeles and Fabray's mother was instrumental in getting her daughter involved in show buisness as a young child. At a very young age she began studying tap dancing with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson among other teachers. She made her professional stage debut as "Miss New Years Eve 1923" at the Million Dollar Theater at the age of 3. The following year she made her first film appearance as an extra in the Our Gang short Cradle Robbers. She spent much of her childhood appearing in vaudeville productions as mainly a dancer but also a singer. She appeared across such stars as Ben Turpin.[1]
Fabray's parents divorced when she was nine years old but her parents continued to live together for financial reasons many years after. During the Great Depression, her mother turned their home into a boarding house which Fabray and her siblings helped her to run. In her early teenage years she attended the Max Reinhardt School of the Theatre on a scholarship. She also attended Hollywood High School where she graduated in 1939. She entered Los Angeles Junior College in the Fall of 1939 but withdrew after only a few months. She had always had difficulty as a student in school due to an undiagnosed hearing impairment which made learning significantly difficult for her. She eventually was diagnosed with a hearing problem in her 20s after an acting teacher encouraged her to get her hearing tested. Of the experience Fabray said, "It was a revelation to me. All these years I had thought I was stupid, but in reality I just had a hearing problem."[1]
Early adult career as a musical theatre actress
At the age of 19, Fabray made her feature film debut came as one of Bette Davis' ladies-in-waiting in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939). She appeared in two other motion pictures that year: The Monroe Doctrine and A Child Is Born. She also appeared in the show Meet the People in Los Angles in 1940 which then toured the United States in 1940-1941. While in the show she sang the opera aria "Caro nome" from Giuseppe Verdi's Rigoletto and did a tap dance to the song as well. While the show was in New York City, Fabray was invited to perform the "Caro nome" number for a benefit at Madison Square Garden with Eleanor Roosevelt as the main speaker. Ed Sullivan was the Master of Ceremonies for the event and the famed host, reading a cue card, mispronounced her name as "Nanette Fa-bare-ass." After this embarassing faux pas, the actress changed the spelling of her name from Fabares to Fabray.[1]
Artur Rodziński, conductor of the New York Philharmonic, saw Fabray's performance in Meet the People and offered to sponser operatic vocal training for her at the Juilliard School. She studied opera at Juilliard during the latter half of 1941 while performing in her first Broadway musical, Let's Face It! with Danny Kaye and Eve Arden. She decided, however, that she preferred musical theatre over opera and withdrew from the school after attending for only five months. She became highly successful as a musical theatre actress in New York during the 1940s and early 1950s, starring in such productions as By Jupiter (1942), My Dear Public (1943), Jackpot (1944), Bloomer Girl (1946), High Button Shoes (1947), Arms and the Girl (1950), and Make a Wish (1951). In 1949 she won the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical for her portrayal of Susan Cooper in Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner's Love Life. She received a second Tony nomination for the role of Nell Henderson in Mr. President in 1963 after an eleven year absence from the New York Stage.[1]
Television and film
In the mid 1940s Fabray worked regularly for David Sarnoff and NBC on a variety of programs for the Los Angeles area. In the early 1950s Fabray made her first high profile national television appearances on Your Show of Shows as a guest star opposite Sid Caesar. She later became a household name serving as Caesar's comedy partner on Caesar's Hour from 1954-1956, for which she won three Emmys. Fabray left the show after a misunderstanding when her business manager, unbeknownst to her, made unreasonable demands for her third season contract, and Fabray and Caesar did not reconcile until a few years later when both became aware of the facts.[1]
Fabray appeared on several series as the mother of a main character: on One Day at a Time she was Ann Romano's mom; on The Mary Tyler Moore Show she was mother to Mary Richards, and on Coach, she played mother to real-life niece Shelley Fabares. She also made appearances on The Carol Burnett Show, Burke's Law, Love, American Style, Maude, The Love Boat, What's My Line?, and Murder, She Wrote. Her brief, eponymous 1961 comedy series was cancelled after 13 episodes. On the PBS program, Pioneers of Television: Sitcoms, Mary Tyler Moore credited her well-known "crying" takes to mimicking Fabray's style of comic crying.[1]
In 1953, Fabray played her most famous screen role as a Betty Comden-like playwright in MGM's The Band Wagon with Fred Astaire and Jack Buchanan. Their performance included a classic musical number, "Triplets", that was eventually included in That's Entertainment Part II. Additional film credits include The Subterraneans (1960) and The Happy Ending (1969).[1]
Fabray's most recent work was in 2007, when she appeared in The Damsel Dialogues, an original revue by composer Dick de Benedictus, with direction/choreography by Miriam Nelson. The show focused on women's' issues with life, love, loss and the work place. The play was performed at the Whitefire Theatre in Sherman Oaks, California.
Personal life
Fabray's first husband, Dave Tebet was a Vice-President of NBC. Her second husband, 1957-1973 (his death), with whom she had one child, was screenwriter and sometime-director Ranald MacDougall, who numbered Mildred Pierce and Cleopatra among his credits and was President of the Writers Guild of America in the early 1970s.
Nanette Fabray is a resident of Pacific Palisades, California. In 2001 she wrote to Dear Abby to decry the loud background music used on television programs today.[2]
Hollywood Walk of Fame
Nanette Fabray has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Partial filmography
Film
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Television
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References
External links
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