Mitzi Gaynor, the actor, singer, and dancer who starred in iconic 1950s Hollywood musicals such as South Pacific and There’s No Business Like Show Business, has died at the age of 93, her management team announced today.
“As we celebrate her legacy, we offer our thanks to her friends and fans and the countless audiences she entertained throughout her long life,” Rene Reyes and Shane Rosamonda of Gaynor’s management team said in the statement announcing her death.
The statement added, “We take great comfort in the fact that her creative legacy will endure through her many magical performances captured on film and video, through her recordings, and especially through the love and support audiences around the world have shared so generously with her throughout her life and career. Please keep Mitzi in your thoughts and prayers.”
Born Francesca Marlene de Czanyi von Gerber in Chicago on September 4, 1931, Gaynor rose to national fame in the early 1950s as the star of Hollywood’s new wave of musicals like There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954), Anything Goes (1956) alongside Bing Crosby and Donald O’Connor, and Les Girls (1957) with Gene Kelly.
20th Century Fox Film Corp./courtesy Everett Collection
The same year as Les Girls, Gaynor was cast in one of her most memorable roles as the girlfriend of nightclub comedian Joe E. Lewis, played by Frank Sinatra, in The Joker Is Wild.
But her signature role came in 1958 when she played Nellie Forbush in the screen version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific. Her Golden Globe-nominated performance featured one of the musical’s most beloved numbers: “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair.”
By the end of the decade, Gaynor had also made inroads into TV variety shows, and by 1968 she starred in her first NBC special called simply, Mitzi. Gaynor and her show became so popular that she became a fixture on TV in the 1970s, headlining annual variety specials on CBS from 1973 to 1978.
She made numerous guest appearances on hallmark variety shows, notably on the February 16, 1964, episode of The Ed Sullivan Show, which also featured The Beatles. During the episode, Gaynor performed “Too Darn Hot” from the stage of the Deauville Hotel in Miami Beach.
Besides her TV career, Gaynor was an immensely popular nightclub and Las Vegas performer. Her Vegas breakthrough came in 1961 at the Flamingo Hotel, breaking box office records and making her the city’s highest-paid female entertainer. She would continue to be a fixture on the Vegas nightlife scene for most of her life, including a successful 2008-2011 tour called Mitzi … Razzle Dazzle! My Life Behind the Sequins.
In 2008, the PBS documentary Mitzi Gaynor Razzle Dazzle: The Special Years highlighted her groundbreaking TV variety shows.
Gaynor married Jack Bean, who served as both her husband and manager until his death in 2006. The couple did not have children. Information on survivors was not immediately available.
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