Doro Merande

Doro Merande, born Dora Matthews on March 31, 1892, in Columbia, Kansas, was an American actress whose career spanned film, theater, and television across more than four decades. The daughter of a minister, she spent her early years in Kansas City, Missouri, where at age eighteen she worked as a music teacher. She later relocated to New York City to pursue acting, beginning her professional stage work with the Jules Levanthal Company and finding her first part with a small summer company in Massachusetts.

Merande made her earliest Broadway appearances under her birth name, including productions in 1922 and 1928. Her first Broadway credit as Doro Merande came in 1935, when she played Sophie Tuttle in Loose Moments. During the years that followed she built her stage résumé through productions including One Good Year, Red Harvest, and Angel Island. A turning point in her career came with Thornton Wilder's Our Town, in which she originated the role of the gossip, a performance she would reprise in the 1940 film adaptation. That screen role marked her first substantial film appearance after a series of bit parts beginning in the early 1930s.

Her Broadway work brought her alongside a number of prominent performers. She appeared with Walter Huston in Apple of His Eye, with Clifton Webb in Mr. Belvedere Rings the Bell, and with Franchot Tone in Hope for Your Best. She was cast opposite Leo G. Carroll in Lo and Behold and appeared with Betty Field in The Rat Race, both productions among her verified Broadway credits. Additional Broadway appearances included Diary of a Scoundrel, Four Twelves Are 48, and The Silver Whistle, the last featuring Jose Ferrer.

Merande's final Broadway appearance came in the 1969 revival of The Front Page, in which she portrayed the cleaning woman. She returned to that same role in a 1970 television version and again in the 1974 film adaptation directed by Billy Wilder. That film marked her final screen appearance. Wilder had previously directed her in The Seven Year Itch in 1955 and Kiss Me, Stupid in 1964.

Her television work was extensive. She held a recurring role as Ivy Harper on the series Valiant Lady from 1956 to 1957 and appeared as Aunt Iris Flower on the CBS sitcom Bringing Up Buddy from 1960 to 1961. From 1966 to 1970 she played Emma Beauregard on The Jackie Gleason Show. Among her many individual television appearances were episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, The Defenders, Playhouse 90, The Phil Silvers Show, and Kraft Television Theater, as well as the NBC satirical revue That Was the Week That Was in 1964, where she appeared in multiple episodes alongside Margaret Hamilton as quirky New Hampshire voters during the presidential election campaign.

Merande had been scheduled to appear in The Honeymooners 25th anniversary television special, cast as the mother-in-law of Jackie Gleason's character Ralph Kramden, but she died before the production could proceed. On November 1, 1975, she suffered a stroke and died at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, Florida, at the age of 83. The role she was to have played was subsequently taken by Templeton Fox.