Gloria DeHaven

Gloria Mildred DeHaven was born on July 23, 1925, in Los Angeles, California, and died on July 30, 2016, in Las Vegas, a week after her 91st birthday, following a stroke and a period in hospice care. She was an actress and singer who worked across film, television, stage, and nightclub performance over the course of several decades. Her parents, Carter DeHaven and Flora Parker DeHaven, were both veterans of vaudeville, and a 1983 newspaper article noted that the family's original surname had been O'Callahan before her father legally adopted the name DeHaven.

DeHaven's screen career began in childhood with a small role in Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times in 1936. She subsequently signed a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where she appeared in featured roles in films including Best Foot Forward (1943), The Thin Man Goes Home (1944), Scene of the Crime (1949), and Summer Stock (1950). In 1944, exhibitors ranked her third among performers most likely to become a star of tomorrow. In the Fred Astaire film Three Little Words (1950), she portrayed her own mother, Flora Parker DeHaven. Decades later, she returned to film as the love interest of Jack Lemmon in the comedy Out to Sea (1997), which also starred Walter Matthau.

Her musical work extended well beyond her film roles. DeHaven sang with the orchestras of Jan Savitt and Bob Crosby and maintained a nightclub act of her own. During the 1950s she performed regularly at the El Rancho Vegas, the first full-service hotel casino on the Las Vegas Strip. In the early 1960s she recorded for the Seeco label, with her work appearing on the 1962 compilation Gloria Lynne and Her Friends, and she was featured on four compilations produced by Ben Bagley under his Revisited series.

DeHaven's Broadway debut came in 1955, when she played the role of Diane in the musical Seventh Heaven. Her stage work continued beyond Broadway in touring productions, including a summer stock run of No, No, Nanette.

Her television career was extensive. She hosted a morning call-in movie program on WABC-TV in New York City from January 1969 to February 1971 and appeared as a guest panelist on five episodes of Match Game 75. She had recurring roles in the soap operas Ryan's Hope, as Bess Shelby, As the World Turns, as Sara Fuller, and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. In 1974 she was cast in the short-lived police drama Nakia. Her guest appearances spanned numerous series, among them The Rifleman, Wagon Train, Gunsmoke, Mannix, Marcus Welby M.D., Fantasy Island, Hart to Hart, The Love Boat, Murder She Wrote, Highway to Heaven, and Touched by an Angel, as well as a guest appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson on March 21, 1974.

DeHaven married four times. Her first husband was actor John Payne, whom she married in 1944 and divorced in 1950; they had two children together, daughter Kathleen Hope, born in 1945, and son Thomas John, born in 1947. Her second marriage, to real estate developer Martin Kimmel, lasted from 1953 to 1954. She married Richard Fincher, a member of the Florida House of Representatives and a Miami Oldsmobile dealer, in 1957; they divorced in 1963, remarried in 1965, and divorced again in 1969. She and Fincher had two children, son Harry, born in 1958, and daughter Faith, born in 1962. In 1960, DeHaven received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6933 Hollywood Boulevard. She was survived by her four children at the time of her death.