Connie Sawyer

Connie Sawyer, born Rosie Cohen on November 27, 1912, in Pueblo, Colorado, was an American actress whose career encompassed stage, film, and television work spanning 85 years. Her parents, Samuel Cohen and Dora Inger, were Romanian-born Orthodox Jews who had emigrated from the same village in Romania, with her mother arriving in the United States first. When Sawyer was seven, the family relocated to Oakland, California, where her father opened an army-navy store. She attended Roosevelt High School in Oakland, where she became the first woman elected senior class president.

Sawyer's mother, who had a strong affinity for showbusiness, encouraged her daughter to study singing and dancing from an early age and entered her in talent competitions as a child. At eight, Sawyer competed in her first such contest with a song and dance routine, placing third and receiving a stack of pies as her prize. A subsequent radio contest in the San Francisco area yielded a first-place finish and a performing slot on the variety program "Al Pearce and His Gang," through which she developed her own comedy material. At nineteen, she moved to New York, traveling across the country with friends and performing in each city along the way before settling in nightclubs and vaudeville theaters. In New York she met Sophie Tucker, who connected her with a comedy writer, and Sawyer began touring with her own show.

Her Broadway career ran from 1948 to 1957 and included four productions: the comedy Hilarities, the drama Miss Isobel, The Time of the Cuckoo, and A Hole in the Head. In A Hole in the Head, she played the role of Miss Wexler, a performance that caught the attention of Lillian Small, an agent working for Frank Sinatra. Sinatra subsequently acquired the rights to produce a film version of the show and hired Sawyer to reprise her role in the 1959 production, which also starred Edward G. Robinson and Eleanor Parker. In the 1950s, Sawyer had also begun appearing on television, with credits including The Milton Berle Show and The Jackie Gleason Show.

Over the course of her career, Sawyer accumulated more than 140 film and television credits. Her television work included appearances on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Laverne & Shirley, The Rockford Files, Hawaii Five-O, Dynasty, Murder She Wrote, Home Improvement, Seinfeld, Boy Meets World, Will & Grace, Welcome Back Kotter, ER, How I Met Your Mother, and Ray Donovan, among others. In 2007 she appeared in the HBO series Tell Me You Love Me alongside Jane Alexander, though she later expressed regret over the role, describing the show as pornographic. In 2012, the year she turned one hundred, she appeared on 2 Broke Girls and was a guest on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in recognition of her centenary. She continued working past the age of one hundred, appearing on NCIS: Los Angeles in 2013 and on New Girl in 2014 opposite Zooey Deschanel, playing a character described as the oldest woman in the world. That same year she appeared in the feature film Lovesick and the short film Entanglement. Among her best-known film appearances were roles in Pineapple Express, Dumb and Dumber, and When Harry Met Sally.

In September 2017, Sawyer self-published an autobiography titled I Never Wanted to Be a Star — and I Wasn't, documenting her life in Hollywood. For twelve years she resided at the Motion Picture & Television Fund's Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California, a retirement community for entertainment industry professionals, where she remained an active member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and continued to screen all Oscar-nominated films before casting her annual votes. At the time of her death she was also the oldest member of the Screen Actors Guild.

Sawyer was married to film distributor Marshall Schacker for ten years; the couple had two daughters, Lisa and Julie, before separating. She died of a heart attack at the Motion Picture & Television Fund's retirement community in Woodland Hills on January 21, 2018, at the age of 105, having been recognized as the oldest working actress in Hollywood at the time of her death.