Frances Chaney

Frances Chaney (July 23, 1915 – November 23, 2004) was an actress whose career spanned radio, stage, and television across several decades. Born Fanya Lipetz in Odessa, in the Russian Empire, she was the daughter of Leon Lipetz. Her family relocated to Istanbul, where she attended an English school, before emigrating to the United States and settling in the Bronx, New York.

Chaney enrolled at Hunter College but left before completing her degree, taking a position at Macy's department store while pursuing an evening apprenticeship at Provincetown Playhouse in New York City. That apprenticeship led to a scholarship at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, where she studied acting for two years. Upon finishing her training, she adopted the name Frances Chaney, believing producers would be more inclined to hire her under an anglicized name than under her Russian birth name.

Her first professional acting work came in the late 1930s on radio programs. She appeared regularly on Gang Busters and Mr. District Attorney, played the character Burma on Terry and the Pirates, and portrayed Marion Kerby on The Adventures of Topper. From 1941 to 1942, she co-starred in House in the Country, a serial broadcast on NBC-Blue. During World War II, she prioritized work for the Armed Forces Radio Service, including steady appearances on the Assignment Home series, sometimes forgoing higher-paying commercial roles to do so.

Chaney made her Broadway debut in 1945 in Irwin Shaw's The Assassin. Her subsequent Broadway credits included The Lovers (1956), Seidman and Son (1962), and Golda (1977). During the years between those engagements, she also understudied for Claudette Colbert, Kim Stanley, and Maureen Stapleton, and appeared in the Ben Hecht play Winkelberg in 1958. Her off-Broadway work included productions of Clifford Odets's Awake and Sing, Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters, and Table Settings, directed by James Lapine.

In 1941, Chaney married David Lardner, a journalist and son of the American author Ring Lardner. They had a son and a daughter. David Lardner was killed in France during World War II when a land mine exploded beneath a jeep he was riding in while working as a correspondent for The New Yorker. On September 28, 1946, in Las Vegas, Nevada, Chaney married David's brother, the screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr., and they remained married until his death in 2000. They had one son together.

In 1947, Ring Lardner Jr. was among the group of screenwriters and directors known as the Hollywood Ten, who refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee's investigation into the film industry. The ten men were cited for contempt of Congress and served sentences of six to twelve months in federal prison. Following his release, the family lived briefly in Mexico before settling in Connecticut in July 1952. Because Chaney was never subpoenaed by HUAC, many accounts describe her as having been graylisted through her association with her husband. Chaney herself maintained that she was blacklisted on the basis of her own prior left-wing activities, including collecting funds for Spanish Civil War refugees.

In September 1952, she secured a supporting role as a Jewish cantor's unmarried niece in the Paddy Chayevsky-written episode Holiday Song on The Philco Television Playhouse. The episode received favorable notices, and producer Fred Coe sent Chaney a note welcoming her as an official member of the Philco Playhouse. By spring 1953, Chayevsky had written a part specifically for Chaney in a new Philco Playhouse script titled Marty. She was called to New York for script approval, but after a day of delays she was told another actress had been cast. The following summer she learned that Holiday Song was being remounted with its entire original cast, with the sole exception of Chaney, which confirmed her suspicion that she had been removed from Marty due to blacklisting rather than a casting error. Her son James Lardner later observed that in some respects his mother faced a more complete professional exclusion than his father, since she was entirely barred from screen work while Ring Lardner Jr. managed to obtain some writing assignments in the 1950s under pseudonyms.

Chaney's return to television came in the late 1950s with a recurring role on the daytime soap opera The Edge of Night, to which she returned for additional episodes in the 1960s. Beginning in the 1980s, her screen work became more consistent. She appeared as a witch in the pilot episode of Tales from the Darkside in 1983, portrayed a long-married wife in the documentary segment of When Harry Met Sally... (1989), appeared in two episodes of Law & Order, and had a supporting role in Life with Mikey (1993).

Chaney died of Alzheimer's disease on November 23, 2004, in New York City, at the age of 89.