Mitzi Gaynor, Leading Lady of Movie Musicals, Is Dead at 93
She was best known for starring in the 1958 screen version of “South Pacific.” But her Hollywood career was brief, and she soon shifted her focus to Las Vegas and TV.
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A black-and-white movie still showing Mitzi Gaynor, a young woman wearing shorts and a bathing suit top, standing barefoot on a beach with both arms extended and a broad smile on her face.
Mitzi Gaynor in the 1958 film version of the Broadway musical “South Pacific.” Doris Day and Elizabeth Taylor were among the actresses considered for the role of Nellie Forbush before Ms. Gaynor was cast.Credit...Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images
By Anita Gates
Oct. 17, 2024, 1:23 p.m. ET
Mitzi Gaynor, the bubbly red-haired actress, singer and dancer who landed one of the most coveted movie roles of the mid-20th century, the female lead in “South Pacific,” but who abandoned film as the era of movie musicals came to an end, died on Thursday in Los Angeles. She was 93.
Her managers, Rene Reyes and Shane Rosamonda, confirmed the death.
The role of Nellie Forbush, a World War II Navy nurse and (in the words of a song lyric) a “cockeyed optimist” in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s hit 1949 Broadway musical, had been originated and defined by Mary Martin. But when it came time to cast the 1958 movie of “South Pacific,” some considered Ms. Martin too old (she was in her 40s) and perhaps too strong-voiced for any actor who might be cast opposite her. (Ezio Pinza, her Broadway co-star, had died.)
Doris Day was considered. Mike Todd wanted his wife, Elizabeth Taylor, to play the role. Ms. Gaynor was the only candidate to agree to do a screen test, she recalled decades later, although she was an established actress, with a dozen films, seven of them musicals, to her credit.
In fact, she was shooting “The Joker Is Wild” (1957), a musical drama with Frank Sinatra, when Oscar Hammerstein II came to town and asked to hear her sing. (Ms. Gaynor always credited Sinatra with making her best-known role possible, because he asked for a change in the shooting schedule that would give her a day off to audition.)
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A black-and-white publicity portrait of Ms. Gaynor, seated and smiling, with very big hair.
Ms. Gaynor in 1962. A year later, she would make her last movie, but she became a star in Las Vegas.Credit...Don Brinn/Associated Press
“South Pacific” was a box-office smash, and Ms. Gaynor’s performance, opposite Rossano Brazzi, was well received. (She turned out to be the onlone of the film’s stars to do her own singing.) But she made only three more films, all comedies without music; the last of them, “For Love or Money” with Kirk Douglas, was released in 1963. She turned instead to television and Las Vegas, where she headlined shows at major resorts for more than a decade.
One TV network appearance made a particularly strong impression: her performance of the Oscar-nominated song “Georgy Girl” at the 1967 Academy Awards, complete with complex choreography, four male backup dancers in white suits, and a striptease costume change. That led to a decade-long series of Emmy Award-winning variety specials, with titles like “Mitzi and a Hundred Guys” and “Mitzi Zings Into Spring.”
Her most notable television experience, however, may also have been her least triumphant. On Feb. 16, 1964, Ms. Gaynor had top billing on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” She sang “It’s Too Darn Hot” and a medley of blues songs, but she was completely overshadowed by another act on the bill that night: the Beatles, in their second American television appearance. At a cast dinner afterward, she recalled, Paul McCartney asked for her autograph.
Francesca Marlene de Czanyi von Gerber was born in Chicago on Sept. 4, 1931, into a show business family. Her father, Henry, was a Hungarian-born cellist and orchestra conductor; her mother, Pauline (Fisher) von Gerber, was a dancer. When Frances, as she was known, was 3, the family moved to Detroit; when she was 11, they moved to Southern California.
At 13, she joined the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera, and it was in one of that company’s shows that she was seen by executives of 20th Century Fox and offered a contract. She had been going by the name Mitzi Gerber (Mitzi being a nickname for Marlene), but studio officials asked her to change it, borrowing the last name of the silent-film star Janet Gaynor.
Mitzi Gaynor’s first film was “My Blue Heaven” (1950), a musical drama with Betty Grable and Dan Dailey.
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A black-and-white photo of three women and two men, wearing elaborate old-fashioned stage costumes, standing together.
From left, Ethel Merman, Dan Dailey, Ms. Gaynor, Donald O’Connor and Marilyn Monroe in a scene from the 1954 movie “There’s No Business Like Show Business.”Credit...20th Century Fox/Getty Images
That was quickly followed by more musicals, including “Golden Girl” (1951), “Bloodhounds of Broadway” (1952) and “The I Don’t Care Girl” (1953), a biography of the vaudeville star Eva Tanguay. She appeared with Ethel Merman, Marilyn Monroe, Donald O’Connor and Dan Dailey in “There’s No Business Like Show Business” (1954); Donald O’Connor and Bing Crosby in “Anything Goes” (1956); and Gene Kelly in “Les Girls” (1957).
Late in life, Ms. Gaynor talked good-naturedly about Marilyn Monroe (with whom she also appeared in a 1952 romantic comedy, “We’re Not Married”) and Monroe’s success compared with hers. “I had more talent. I could do more things,” she told The Hollywood Reporter sweetly in a video interview in 2013. But, she acknowledged, “I wasn’t — sexy.”
When asked about her favorite male dancers, Ms. Gaynor often said that Donald O’Connor was the best solo dancer she had ever worked with, but that Gene Kelly had been the best partner.
Ms. Gaynor’s partner in life was Jack Bean, an agent at MCA, whom she married in 1954. He went on to manage her career, doing his job a bit too well at times.
While the couple were still honeymooners, George Abbott, the revered Broadway producer and director, asked for a meeting and told Ms. Gaynor that he wanted her to play Lola, the seductive agent of the Devil, in the musical he was planning, “Damn Yankees.” Unfortunately, Mr. Bean had just committed his new wife to a four-picture deal in Hollywood. Another talented redhead, Gwen Verdon, went on to play Lola, winning one of the show’s seven Tony Awards in 1956. Ms. Gaynor never made it to Broadway.
She forgave Mr. Bean, and they were together until his death in 2006. No immediate family members survive.
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Singing before an audience sitting at tables, she looks up at the ceiling with her arms raised, lifting a white ruffled gown enough to bare her legs. A pianist and a bass player, both in black tuxedos, play behind her.
Ms. Gaynor made her New York nightclub debut in 2010, when she was 78, in a show titled “Razzle Dazzle! My Life Behind the Sequins,” at Feinstein’s Cabaret in Manhattan.Credit...Richard Termine for The New York Times
Ms. Gaynor remained active in show business into her 80s, making her New York nightclub debut at 78, in 2010, at Feinstein’s Cabaret in Midtown Manhattan. And she remained an upbeat interview subject, breaking into celebrity impressions while talking to reporters and relentlessly looking at the bright side.
“Just think about how lucky I am,” she said in a 2012 interview for the Archive of American Television, in which she praised the co-stars she had over the years. “I’ve never had to work with a stinker.”
Predictably, interviewers often asked her for the wisdom that came with maturity. “The secret to aging gracefully is simple,” she told The Chicago Sun-Times in 2013. “Just have a good attitude. Enjoy who you are. Remember that life is a wonderful thing.”
On the other hand, she said in the same interview, “I’d kill to be 50.”
Hannah Fidelman contributed reporting.
