Adrienne Matzenauer

Adrienne Matzenauer Ferrari-Fontana, born January 20, 1914, in Boston, Massachusetts, was an American singer, television host, and Broadway performer who died on June 10, 2010, at the age of 96 in her Santa Monica, California home. She was the daughter of Margaret Matzenauer, a prima donna contralto with the Metropolitan Opera, and Edoardo Ferrari-Fontana, an Italian physician who served as leading dramatic tenor with the Boston Opera Company. Because of her parents' operatic prominence, Matzenauer was known from birth as "the first grand opera baby." Enrico Caruso was her godfather. Her parents divorced in 1917, after which she was raised in her mother's household and accompanied her mother on tour in 1923.

Matzenauer's Broadway career began in 1934 with the revue Life Begins at 8:40, followed by the play Symphony in 1935. In 1936, she was cast in the George Cukor film Camille but collapsed on set and was replaced by Jean Acker. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s she worked as a nightclub singer, performing at the Place Piquale in New York, the Rainbow Room in Rockefeller Center, and the Balinese Room in Boston, while also appearing on radio broadcasts. She returned to Broadway in 1948 in If the Shoe Fits, and that same year hosted a variety television program called Champagne and Orchids on the DuMont Network.

Matzenauer married theatrical producer and director Michael Myerberg; the couple had two sons, Edward Antonio, known as Tony, and Paul, and divorced in 1958. Her second marriage, to Robert J. Henoch, took place in 1961 and ended in divorce in 1976. In her later years she lived in Southern California under the name Adrienne Henoch, cared for her mother during her final years, and sang aboard a cruise ship in the early 1970s.