Ilka Chase

Ilka Chase (April 8, 1905 – February 15, 1978) was an American actress, novelist, radio host, and Broadway performer born in New York City. The only child of Francis Dane Chase, who worked variously as a merchant mariner, dry goods salesman, and general manager of New York's Hotel Colonial, and Edna Woolman Chase, who rose to become editor-in-chief of Vogue, Chase was educated at convent and boarding schools across the United States, England, and France. Her parents divorced, after which her father married artist Theodora Larsh and her mother married engineer Richard Newton. Chase completed her formal schooling at the Château de Groslay boarding school in France and made her society debut in December 1923 at a banquet hosted by her mother at the Cosmopolitan Club in New York City, attended by 250 guests including publisher Condé Nast, Vanity Fair editor-in-chief Frank Crowninshield, and future Harper's Bazaar editor-in-chief Carmel Snow.

Chase's first stage experience came at the age of eight in a convent-school production of Puss in Boots. Her Broadway debut followed in 1924 with The Red Falcon, launching a stage career that spanned nearly four decades, through 1963. Among her Broadway appearances were roles in Days Without End, Forsaking All Others, While Parents Sleep, Small Miracle, On to Fortune, Tampico, Keep Off the Grass, and The Old Women. She starred in Co-Respondent Unknown and was part of the original Broadway cast of Clare Boothe Luce's The Women in 1938. Chase also appeared in In Bed We Cry, a stage adaptation of her own 1943 novel of the same name in which she took the leading role. Later in her stage career she appeared in Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park. In 1932, Chase and her second husband, William Buckley Murray, collaborated on an adaptation of We Are No Longer Children, a play by French playwright Léopold Marchand.

Chase's film work began with Fast and Loose in 1930 and included The Animal Kingdom (1932), Now, Voyager (1942), Once a Sinner (1950), and The Big Knife (1955). Her final film appearance was in Ocean's 11 (1960), in which she played Mrs. Restes. On radio in the early 1940s, she served as hostess for Penthouse Party on CBS and Luncheon Date With Ilka Chase on NBC Red, and for several years hosted Luncheon at the Waldorf. Her television work included appearances as a panelist on Celebrity Time (1949–50), Who Said That? (1950–55), and Masquerade Party (1952–56). She hosted Fashion Magic on both WCAU television and the CBS television series of the same name in 1950–51, with the WCAU broadcast airing on Monday and Friday afternoons. In 1957 she played the Stepmother in the television production of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella, starring Julie Andrews, and in 1963 she appeared as Aunt Pauline on The Patty Duke Show. She was also a regular cast member on the CBS series The Trials of O'Brien in the mid-1960s.

As a writer, Chase published her first memoir, Past Imperfect, in 1942, followed by a second volume, Free Admission, in 1948. Her novel In Bed We Cry appeared in 1943, and she went on to publish more than a dozen additional books, among them several novels and a collection of travel writing recounting journeys she took with her third husband, physician Norton Sager Brown. These travel books included The Carthaginian Rose (1961), Elephants Arrive at Half-Past Five (1963), and several subsequent volumes. She also wrote The Care and Feeding of Friends, a guide to entertaining that included more than 80 recipes and 20 menus.

Chase was married three times. Her first marriage was to stage and film actor Louis Calhern; the two met while performing in summer stock with the George Cukor Company in Rochester, New York, married in June 1926, and divorced in February 1927. She married her second husband, William Buckley Murray — a former music critic for The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, onetime NBC executive, former concert manager for the Baldwin Piano Company, and eventual head of radio and television at the William Morris Agency — on July 13, 1935, in Greenwich, Connecticut. Their marriage produced one stepson, William Buckley Murray Jr., who later became a crime novelist and writer for The New Yorker. Chase and Murray divorced in Las Vegas on December 4, 1946. Three days later, on December 7, 1946, she married Brown in Las Vegas; the two had each divorced their respective spouses in order to wed. They remained married until Chase's death. From her marriage to Brown she gained a stepson, James Brown.

Chase died of internal hemorrhaging on February 15, 1978, in Mexico City, Mexico, at the age of 72. She was buried beside her mother at Locust Valley Cemetery on Long Island, New York. Her personal papers, along with those of her mother, are held by the Billy Rose Theatre Division of the New York Public Library.