Dina Merrill

Dina Merrill, born Nedenia Marjorie Hutton on December 29, 1923, in New York City, was an American actress whose career spanned stage, film, and television from the mid-1940s through the 2000s. She accumulated more than a hundred film and television credits over the course of her professional life. Merrill died on May 22, 2017, at her home in East Hampton, New York, at age 93, following a period of illness from Lewy body dementia.

Merrill came from a prominent family. Her mother was Post Cereals heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, and her father was Wall Street stockbroker Edward Francis Hutton, one of the founders of E. F. Hutton & Co. She was their only child together, though she had two older half-sisters, Adelaide Brevoort Close and Eleanor Post Hutton, from her mother's prior marriage to Edward Bennett Close, who was the grandfather of actress Glenn Close. Through her father's side of the family, Merrill was first cousin to heiress Barbara Hutton and first cousin once removed to Barbara's son Lance Reventlow. For many years, her birth date was publicly listed as December 9, 1925, rather than her actual date of December 29, 1923.

She was educated at Miss Porter's School before briefly attending George Washington University in Washington, D.C. for a single term. She subsequently enrolled at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City and later studied acting under Uta Hagen at HB Studio. On the advice of a half-sister's husband, she adopted the stage name Dina Merrill, drawing it from Charles E. Merrill, a stockbroker of note, as a parallel to her own father's profession.

Merrill's Broadway career extended from 1945 to 1983. She made her stage debut in The Mermaids Singing in 1945, and her Broadway credits also included the drama Angel Street and the 1983 revival of the Rodgers and Hart musical On Your Toes, which starred Russian prima ballerina Natalia Makarova. In 1991, she took part in the rotating cast of the off-Broadway staged reading Wit & Wisdom.

Her film work began in the late 1950s and included Desk Set (1957), A Nice Little Bank That Should Be Robbed (1958), Don't Give Up the Ship (1959), Operation Petticoat (1959), The Sundowners (1960), Butterfield 8 (1960), The Young Savages (1961), The Courtship of Eddie's Father (1963), I'll Take Sweden (1965), The Greatest (1977), A Wedding (1978), Just Tell Me What You Want (1980), Anna to the Infinite Power (1983), Caddyshack II (1988), True Colors (1991), The Player (1992), Suture (1993), and Shade (2003), among others. In 1959, she was publicly described as Hollywood's new Grace Kelly. Her television work was equally extensive, encompassing made-for-TV films such as Seven in Darkness (1969) and The Tenth Month (1979), as well as guest appearances on series including Bonanza, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Mission: Impossible, Murder She Wrote, Roseanne, and The Nanny, where she played Maxwell Sheffield's disapproving British mother. She portrayed the villain Calamity Jan in two 1968 episodes of Batman alongside her then-husband Cliff Robertson. During the 1960s and 1970s, she was also a recurring guest on network game and panel programs including Match Game, To Tell the Truth, What's My Line, and Hollywood Squares.

In 1991, Merrill and her third husband, producer Ted Hartley, merged their company Pavilion Communications with RKO to form RKO Pictures, which holds the intellectual property of RKO Radio Pictures. Merrill also served in several civic and institutional roles, including as a presidential appointee to the board of trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a trustee of the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, and a vice president of the New York City Mission Society. In 1980, she joined the board of directors of E. F. Hutton & Co. and subsequently continued on the board and compensation committee of Lehman Brothers after it acquired Hutton, serving in that capacity for over eighteen years.

Merrill was married three times. In 1946, she married Stanley M. Rumbough Jr., an heir to the Colgate-Palmolive fortune, with whom she had three children before their divorce in 1966. That same year she married actor Cliff Robertson, and the couple had one daughter together before divorcing in 1986. In 1989, she married Ted Hartley, and they remained married until her death. Two of her four children predeceased her, one in a boating accident and another from ovarian cancer.

Among her honors, Merrill received the Women's International Center Living Legacy Award in 1994 and a lifetime achievement award from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in April 2005.