Gertrude Niesen

Gertrude Niesen (July 8, 1911 – March 27, 1975) was an American torch singer, actress, comedian, and songwriter born in New York, New York, aboard a ship as her Swedish father and Russian mother were returning from a vacation in Europe. As a child she pursued an interest in performing, working in vaudeville before attending Brooklyn Heights Seminary, where she developed her musical abilities.

Niesen launched her professional singing career in the early 1930s, working in radio and nightclubs before transitioning to broader entertainment platforms. Her screen debut came in 1932 in the Vitaphone short film Yacht Party, in which she appeared alongside Roger Wolfe Kahn and His Orchestra and Artie Shaw, credited as Gertrude Nissen. That same year she made her Broadway debut in the musical Take a Chance. In 1933 she became the first artist to record "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," the song written by Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach, doing so for one of the several major labels — Victor, Columbia, and Brunswick — with which she recorded during the decade.

Her Broadway career continued with the 1934 revue Calling All Stars and an appearance in the Radio City Music Hall Inaugural Program, as well as the Ziegfeld Follies of 1931 and the Ziegfeld Follies of 1936. On radio, she served as the featured singer on The Ex-Lax Big Show on CBS, a position she left in the summer of 1935 to perform leading roles at the St. Louis Municipal Opera Theatre. She later hosted The Show Shop in 1942 on NBC-Blue.

Niesen's singing at a Hollywood café led to a contract with Universal, and she went on to appear in a number of films throughout the late 1930s and 1940s. In Top of the Town (1937) she performed four songs, and in A Night at Earl Carroll's (1940) she sang "I Want to Make with the Happy Times," a song she had co-written. Her additional film credits include Start Cheering (1938), Rookies on Parade (1941), This Is the Army (1943), He's My Guy (1943), and The Babe Ruth Story (1948).

Her most prominent Broadway role came in 1944 when she co-starred with Jackie Gleason in Follow the Girls, in which she performed "I Want to Get Married," one of her most recognized songs. Throughout the 1940s she recorded for Decca Records, releasing a self-titled LP for the label in 1951, and she made television appearances in the early 1950s.

On July 19, 1943, Niesen married Chicago nightclub owner Al Greenfield in Las Vegas. The couple divorced but later remarried in 1954 and remained married until her death on March 27, 1975, at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Hollywood, California, following a long illness. She was 63 years old.