Jayne Meadows

Jayne Meadows, born Jane Cotter on September 27, 1919, in Wuchang, Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, was an American actress whose career spanned stage, film, and television, as well as work as an author and lecturer. She died on April 26, 2015, at her home in Encino, California, at the age of 95, and is buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in the Hollywood Hills. The elder sister of actress Audrey Meadows, she was born to American Episcopal missionary parents, the Reverend Francis James Meadows Cotter and Ida Miller Taylor Cotter, who had wed in 1915. She also had two older brothers. In the early 1930s, the family relocated to Sharon, Connecticut, where her father became rector of Christ Church. Both Meadows and her sister Audrey later lived at the Rehearsal Club in New York City while pursuing their careers.

Meadows made her Broadway debut in 1941 and continued performing on stage through 1978. Her Broadway credits included the play Once in a Lifetime, the comedy The Gazebo, Kiss Them for Me, the comedy Many Happy Returns, and the farce The Odds on Mrs. Oakley. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer signed her to a film contract in 1944, at which point Jane Cotter adopted the professional name Jayne Meadows, drawing on Meadows as a paternal family name. Rather than ingénue parts, she gravitated toward intense character roles. Her film work included Undercurrent alongside Katharine Hepburn, Song of the Thin Man with William Powell and Myrna Loy, Lady in the Lake with Robert Montgomery and Audrey Totter, David and Bathsheba with Gregory Peck, Susan Hayward, and Raymond Massey, and Enchantment with David Niven and Teresa Wright. For her performance in Enchantment, Louella Parsons presented her with the Cosmopolitan Award for Finest Dramatic Performance of 1949.

On television, Meadows became a regular panelist on the original version of I've Got a Secret and appeared occasionally on To Tell the Truth and What's My Line?, the latter alongside her husband Steve Allen, the original host of The Tonight Show, whom she married in 1954. Earlier, she had been married to screenwriter Milton Krims from 1949 to 1954. She and Allen had one son, Bill, and she became stepmother to Allen's three sons from his first marriage: Stephen Jr., Brian, and David. Among her early television roles, she played reporter Helen Brady in a 1953 episode of Suspense opposite Walter Matthau. She also appeared on the NBC interview program Here's Hollywood, and she and Allen periodically performed together as a nightclub act during the early years of Las Vegas live entertainment.

Allen's television series Meeting of Minds, which ran from 1977 to 1981, featured historical figures in a talk-show format, and Meadows appeared nine times across the series, portraying characters including Cleopatra, Marie Antoinette, Catherine the Great, Margaret Sanger, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Florence Nightingale. She was nominated for three Emmy Awards during her career. In 1998, she and Allen played an argumentative elderly couple in an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street, and in 1999 they appeared together in the Dick Van Dyke series Diagnosis: Murder episode titled "The Roast," which marked Allen's final screen appearance. She also provided the telephone voice of Billy Crystal's character's mother in City Slickers. Allen's series of humorous mystery novels, beginning with The Talk Show Murders in 1982, cast both Allen and Meadows as amateur detectives.

Meadows owned a travel agency from at least 1964 through at least 1967 and received several honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degrees from various universities. She remained professionally active until 2009, when a fractured hip curtailed her public appearances. Her last public appearance came in August 2009 at the Early TV Memories First-Class Commemorative Stamp Dedication Ceremony. Allen had died in 2000, and Meadows is buried beside him at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in the Hollywood Hills.