Dorothy Collins

Dorothy Collins, born Marjorie Chandler on November 18, 1926, in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, was a Canadian-American singer, actress, and recording artist who performed on Broadway from 1971 to 1973. She died on July 21, 1994, in Watervliet, New York, from asthma and heart disease, survived by her three daughters.

Collins adopted her stage name in her mid-teens and began her career singing on radio stations in Windsor and Detroit. In 1940, at age 14, she and her family met bandleader and composer Raymond Scott in Chicago, and she soon became his protégée. By early 1942, at age 15, she had joined Scott's orchestra as a featured vocalist, performing on radio and on tour. Scott coached her in pitch, phrasing, and delivery, and mentored her performance skills more broadly. Toward the end of the 1940s, she contributed vocals to the revived Raymond Scott Quintette, a sextet that released records on Scott's own Master label and served as the house band on the radio program Herb Shriner Time. In 1949, when Scott was hired to conduct the orchestra on CBS Radio's Lucky Strike's Your Hit Parade, Collins was trained by him to lead his sextet on tour during his absences.

When Your Hit Parade moved to NBC television in 1950, Scott remained as conductor and encouraged Collins to audition for a vocalist slot. She was hired and became one of the show's featured performers, singing and acting in costume in sketches built around popular songs of the day. She was absent from the program during the 1957–58 season, when a new cast replaced her and her fellow vocalists, but returned for the series' final season on CBS Television, which ended in April 1959. During her tenure on the program, Collins frequently appeared as spokeswoman and vocalist in Lucky Strike cigarette commercials, earning the designation "The Sweetheart of Lucky Strike." On October 23, 1956, she made television history as the first performer to appear on videotape, in a musical segment on NBC's The Jonathan Winters Show. Her additional television credits include The Steve Allen Show, The Bell Telephone Hour, and The Hollywood Palace. From 1961 to 1963, she served as co-host and stunt participant on CBS-TV's Candid Camera alongside Durward Kirby and series creator Allen Funt, and in 1961 she occasionally guest-hosted a short-lived CBS Radio Network show featuring Carol Burnett and Richard Hayes.

Collins charted several singles during the 1950s. Her 1955 single "My Boy – Flat Top" reached No. 16 on the Billboard charts, and a follow-up, "Baciare Baciare (Kissing Kissing)," peaked at No. 43. In 1956, "Seven Days" reached No. 17. In 1958, she released Picnic: Dorothy Collins Sings Steve Allen on the Coral Records label, an album of compositions by the musician, television host, and comedian Steve Allen. Around 1960, she sang educational tunes on Experiment Songs, one of six LPs in a set called Ballads for the Age of Science, composed and produced by Hy Zaret and Lou Singer. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, she provided vocals for numerous television and radio commercials produced and recorded by Raymond Scott's Jingle Workshop; a selection of those recordings was issued in 2019 on the double album The Jingle Workshop: Midcentury Musical Miniatures 1951–1965 on the Modern Harmonic label. In 1979, she performed in concert at Michael's Pub in New York.

Her stage career included regional and summer stock work before her Broadway debut. In the summer of 1957, she played Dorothy Gale in the Municipal Opera Association of St. Louis production of The Wizard of Oz, with Margaret Hamilton reprising her film role as the Wicked Witch of the West. She also played the title role in the Saint Paul Civic Opera Association's presentation of The Unsinkable Molly Brown. In 1971, Collins made her Broadway debut in Stephen Sondheim's Follies, portraying Sally Durant Plummer, a former Ziegfeld-style showgirl trapped in a disappointing marriage. The performance earned her a Tony Award nomination for Best Actress in a Musical in 1972, though she lost to her co-star Alexis Smith. When the production moved to Los Angeles in 1972, Collins reprised the role of Sally. She returned to Broadway in Sondheim: A Musical Tribute in 1973. At the Melody Top summer stock theatre in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, she later starred in Good News in 1975 and reprised her role in Follies in 1977. In 1980, she appeared as Dolly in Hello, Dolly! at An Evening Dinner Theatre in Elmsford, New York.

Collins married Raymond Scott in 1952; they divorced in 1965 and had two daughters, Deborah and Elizabeth. She met actor Ron Holgate while appearing in a touring production of Do I Hear a Waltz and married him in December 1966. They had a daughter, Melissa, separated in 1977, and divorced in 1980. Scott died five months before Collins's own death in July 1994.