Nanette Fabray

Nanette Fabray
Fabray in 1963
Born	Ruby Bernadette Nanette Fabares (1920-10-27)October 27, 1920 San Diego, California, U.S.
Died	Palos Verdes, California, U.S.
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1924–2007
Spouse(s)	David Tebet (m. 1947; div. 1951) Ranald MacDougall (m. 1957; his death 1973)
Children	1
Relatives	Shelley Fabares (niece)

Nanette Fabray (born Ruby Bernadette Nanette Fabares; October 27, 1920 – February 22, 2018) was an American actress, singer and dancer. She began her career performing in vaudeville as a child and became a musical theatre actress during the 1940s and 1950s, winning a Tony Award in 1949 for her performance in Love Life. In the mid-1950s, she served as Sid Caesar's comedic partner on Caesar's Hour, for which she won three Emmy Awards, as well as co-starring with Fred Astaire in the film musical The Band Wagon. From 1979 to 1984, she appeared as Katherine Romano on the TV series One Day at a Time.

Fabray overcame a significant hearing impairment and was a long-time advocate for the rights of the deaf and hard-of-hearing. Her honors for representing the handicapped included the President's Distinguished Service Award and the Eleanor Roosevelt Humanitarian Award.

Early life

Fabray was born Ruby Bernadette Nanette Fabares on October 27, 1920, in San Diego, to Lily Agnes (McGovern), a housewife, and Raoul Bernard Fabares, a train conductor. The family resided in Los Angeles, and Fabray's mother was instrumental in getting her daughter involved in show business as a child. At a young age, she studied tap dance with, among others, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. She made her professional stage debut as "Miss New Years Eve 1923" at the Million Dollar Theater at the age of three. She spent much of her childhood appearing in vaudeville productions as a dancer and singer. She appeared with stars such as Ben Turpin.

Fabray's parents divorced when she was nine, but they continued living together for financial reasons. During the Great Depression, her mother turned their home into a boarding house, which Fabray and her siblings helped run. In her early teenage years, Fabray attended the Max Reinhardt School of the Theatre on a scholarship. She then attended Hollywood High School, where she graduated in 1939. She entered Los Angeles Junior College in the fall of 1939 but withdrew a few months later. She had always had difficulty in school due to an undiagnosed hearing impairment, which made learning difficult. She eventually was diagnosed with a hearing loss in her twenties after an acting teacher encouraged her to get her hearing tested. Fabray said of the experience, "It was a revelation to me. All these years I had thought I was stupid, but in reality I just had a hearing problem."

Career

Pearl Bailey and Nanette Fabray in the Broadway musical Arms and the Girl (1950)

Theatre

At the age of 19, Fabray made her feature film debut as one of Bette Davis's ladies-in-waiting in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939). She appeared in two additional motion pictures that year for Warner Bros., The Monroe Doctrine and A Child Is Born but was not signed to a long-term studio contract. She next appeared in the stage production Meet the People in Los Angeles in 1940, which then toured the United States in 1940–1941. In the show, she sang the opera aria "Caro nome" from Giuseppe Verdi's Rigoletto while tap dancing. During the show's New York run, 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 embarrassing faux pas, the actress changed the spelling of her name from Fabares to Fabray.

Artur Rodziński, conductor of the New York Philharmonic, saw Fabray's performance in Meet the People and offered to sponsor operatic vocal training for her at the Juilliard School. She studied opera at Juilliard with Lucia Dunham during the latter half of 1941 while performing in her first Broadway musical, Cole Porter's Let's Face It!, with Danny Kaye and Eve Arden. She decided that she preferred musical theatre over opera and withdrew from the school after five months. She became a successful 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 Actress in a Musical for her portrayal of Susan Cooper in the Kurt Weill/Alan Jay Lerner musical Love Life. She received a Tony nomination for her role as Nell Henderson in 1963 for Mr. President 1963 after an eleven-year absence from the New York stage. Fabray continued to tour in musicals for many years, appearing in such shows as Wonderful Town and No, No, Nanette.

Television and film

Fabray in 1957

In the mid-1940s, Fabray worked regularly for NBC on a variety of programs in the Los Angeles area. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, she made her first high-profile national television appearances performing on a number of variety programs such as The Ed Sullivan Show, Texaco Star Theatre, and The Arthur Murray Party.

She also appeared on Your Show of Shows as a guest star opposite Sid Caesar. She appeared as a regular on Caesar's Hour from 1954 to 1956, winning three Emmys. Fabray left the show after a misunderstanding when her business manager, unbeknownst to her, made unreasonable demands for her third season contract. Fabray and Caesar did not reconcile until years later.

In 1961, Fabray starred in 26 episodes of Westinghouse Playhouse, a half-hour sitcom series that also was known as The Nanette Fabray Show and Yes, Yes Nanette.

Fabray appeared as the mother of the main character on several television series such as One Day at a Time, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and Coach, where she played mother to real-life niece Shelley Fabares. Like her aunt, Shelley Fabares also appeared on One Day at a Time.

Fabray made 13 guest appearances on The Carol Burnett Show. She performed on multiple episodes of The Dean Martin Show, The Hollywood Palace, Perry Como's Kraft Music Hall and The Andy Williams Show. She was a panelist on 230 episodes of the long-running game show The Hollywood Squares as well as a mystery guest on What's My Line?

She appeared in guest-starring acting roles on Burke's Law, Love, American Style, Maude, The Love Boat and Murder, She Wrote. On the PBS program Pioneers of Television: Sitcoms, Mary Tyler Moore credited Fabray with inspiring her trademark comedic crying technique.

In 1953, Fabray played her best-known screen role as a Betty Comden-like playwright in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musical The Band Wagon with Fred Astaire and Jack Buchanan. The film featured Fabray, Astaire, and Buchanan performing the classic musical number "Triplets", which was included in That's Entertainment, Part II. Fabray's additional film credits include; The Subterraneans (1960), The Happy Ending (1969), Harper Valley PTA (1978), Amy (1981), and Teresa's Tattoo (1994).

Fabray's most recent work was in 2007, when she appeared in The Damsel Dialogues, an original revue by composer Dick DeBenedictis, with direction/choreography by Miriam Nelson. The show, which was performed at the Whitefire Theatre in Sherman Oaks, California, focused on women's issues with life, love, loss, and the workplace.

Personal life and death

Fabray's first husband, David Tebet, was a vice president of NBC. Her second husband was screenwriter Ranald MacDougall, whose writing credits include Mildred Pierce and Cleopatra and who, in the early 1970s, served as president of the Writers Guild of America. The couple was married from 1957 until his death in 1973. They had one child: Jamie MacDougall. She was a resident of Pacific Palisades, California; and was the aunt of singer/actress Shelley Fabares. Her niece's 1984 wedding to actor Mike Farrell was at her home. Fabray was associated with Ronald Reagan's campaign for the governorship of California in 1966.

She was hospitalized for almost two weeks after being knocked unconscious by a falling pipe backstage during a broadcast of Caesar's Hour in 1955. In 2001, she wrote to advice columnist Dear Abby to decry the loud background music played on television programs. Fabray died on February 22, 2018 at the Canterbury Nursing home in the age of 97.

Honors

Nanette Fabray has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She was awarded the President's Distinguished Service Award and the Eleanor Roosevelt Humanitarian Award for her long efforts on behalf of the hearing impaired.

Partial filmography

Film

Year	Title	Role
1939	The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex	Mistress Margaret Radcliffe
1939	A Child Is Born	Gladys Norton
1939	The Monroe Doctrine	Rosita De La Torre
1953	The Band Wagon	Lily Marton
1960	The Subterraneans	Society Woman
1969	The Happy Ending	Agnes
1970	The Cockeyed Cowboys of Calico County	Sadie
1978	Harper Valley PTA	Alice Finley
1981	Amy	Malvina
1989	Personal Exemptions	Mildred McFall
1994	Teresa's Tattoo	Martha Mae
2003	Broadway: The Golden Age, by the Legends Who Were There	Herself

Television

Year	Title	Role	Notes
1954–1956	Caesar's Hour	Herself
1959	Laramie	Elsie Bright	Episode: "Glory Road"
1960	Startime	Sally	Episode: "The Nanette Fabray Show, or Help Me, Aphrodite"
1961	The Nanette Fabray Show	Nanette "Nan" McGovern	26 episodes
1966	Alice Through the Looking Glass	The White Queen	TV Movie
	Fame Is the Name of the Game	Pat	TV Movie
1970	George M!	Helen Costigan "Nellie" Cohan	TV Movie
	But I Don't Want to Get Married!	Mrs. Vale	TV Movie
1972	Magic Carpet	Virginia Wolfe	TV Movie
	The Couple Takes a Wife	Marion Randolph	TV Movie
	The Mary Tyler Moore Show	Dottie Richards	2 episodes
1974	Happy Anniversary and Goodbye	Fay	TV Movie
1977	Maude	Katie Malloy	Episode: "Maude's Reunion"
1978–1981	The Love Boat	Shirley Simpson / Mitzy Monroe / Maggie O'Brian	3 episodes
1979–1984	One Day at a Time	Grandma Katherine Romano	42 episodes
1979	The Man in the Santa Claus Suit	Dora Dayton	TV Movie
1983–1986	Hotel	Harriet Gold / Maggie Lewis	2 episodes
1989	The Munsters Today	Dottie	Episode: "Computer Mating"
1990–1994	Coach	Mildred Armstrong	3 episodes
1991	Murder, She Wrote	Emmaline Bristow	Episode: "From the Horse's Mouth"
1993	The Golden Palace	Fern	Episode: "Rose and Fern"

Stage work

• The Miracle (1939)
• Six Characters in Search of an Author (1939)
• The Servant of Two Masters (1939)
• Meet the People (1940)
• Let's Face It! (1941)
• By Jupiter (1942) (replacement for Constance Moore)
• My Dear Public (1943)
• Jackpot (1944)
• Bloomer Girl (1945; 1947; 1949)
• High Button Shoes (1947)
• Love Life (1948)
• Arms and the Girl (1950)
• Make a Wish (1951)
• Mr. President (1962)
• No Hard Feelings (1973)
• Applause (1973)
• Plaza Suite (1975)
• Wonderful Town (1975)
• The Secret Affairs of Mildred Wild (1977)
• Call Me Madam (1979)
• Prince of Central Park (1989) (replacement for Jo Anne Worley)
• The Bermuda Avenue Triangle (1997)

External links

• Nanette Fabray at the Internet Broadway Database
• Nanette Fabray at the Internet Off-Broadway Database
• Nanette Fabray at the Internet Movie Database
• Nanette Fabray interview video at the Archive of American Television