Actress and singer Gloria DeHaven, 91, died Saturday in Las Vegas, according to numerous news accounts. The actress, who at one time was a Darien resident, performed in Hollywood musicals in the 1940s and ’50s, and later in the television shows “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” and “Ryan’s Hope.”
Gloria DeHaven (a 1953 publicity photo).
DeHaven was born Feb. 8, 1925 in Los Angeles. She came from a show-business family: Her parents, Flora Parker and Carter DeHaven, were popular vaudeville and stage performers, and her brother, Carter DeHaven Jr., would later become a producer.
When she was a child, she got a bit part in Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times” (1936) because her father was one of the film’s assistant director, according to the Los Angeles Times. In 1940 she landed a small role in “The Great Dictator,” another Chaplin film.
In 1940, she went under contract with MGM and appeared in the film “Susan and God” while singing with orchestras. At one point, she had her own nightclub act.
She received her first screen kiss from Frank Sinatra in “Step Lively” and in 1950 she played her own mother in “Three Little Words,” starring Fred Astaire.
A 1964 advertisement from the Southern New England Telephone Company featuring DeHaven as a “stage and screen star” and a Darien resident. “W-F-T” is unexplained (from the Feb. 24, 1964 Bridgeport Post, page 13).
When Hollywood musicals faded in the 1950s, her career took a turn, and she acted on Broadway, in summer stock, including “No, No, Nanette,” and later in “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” a soap-opera spoof in the 1970s, and the soap opera “Ryan’s Hope” in the 1980s.
She had many guest appearances on other television shows over the decades, including “The Lloyd Bridges Show,” “Marcus Welby, M.D.,” “Gunsmoke,” “Mannix,” “Fantasy Island,” “Murder, She Wrote” and “Touched By An Angel.”
In 1997, she was Jack Lemmon’s love interest in the comedy “Out to Sea,” also starring Walter Matthau. DeHaven herself was not a major movie star, but she does have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, in front of 6933 Hollywood Blvd.
DeHaven married three men, one of them twice: John Payne (from 1944 to 1950, with whom she had two children, Kathleen and Thomas Payne), Martin Kimmel (from 1953 to 1954), and Richard Fincher twice (from 1957 to 1963 and from 1965 to 1969; the couple had two children, Harry and Faith Fincher).
Details on funeral services appear not to have been announced.
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There are a slew of screen clips and other videos featuring Gloria DeHaven on YouTube, including these: