Kipp Hamilton

Rita Marie "Kipp" Hamilton was born on August 16, 1934, in Los Angeles, California, the youngest of six children born to Joseph and Marie Hamilton. Her brother Joe Hamilton was an actor and producer who married comedian and producer Carol Burnett, making Hamilton the sister-in-law of the television star. Hamilton died on January 29, 1981, at the age of 46, from breast cancer, and is buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California.

Hamilton's screen career began with a supporting role in the RKO Radio Pictures drama On Our Very Own in 1950. By mid-1955, she had signed a seven-year contract with 20th Century Fox and was included among a group of ten up-and-coming actresses — among them Anita Ekberg and Lori Nelson — designated as "Deb Stars of 1955." That same year she took on her first major film role, portraying Jincey Baker in the drama Good Morning, Miss Dove. She subsequently requested release from her Fox contract and spent the latter half of the 1950s in guest roles across several television series, including Perry Mason, Meet McGraw, Richard Diamond Private Detective, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, The Texan, and 77 Sunset Strip.

In 1959, Hamilton appeared in a supporting role in Never So Few and signed with the production company Hecht Hill Lancaster, partially owned by actor Burt Lancaster, leading to her casting in the Western The Unforgiven, released in 1960. During this period she also maintained a nightclub act performed at Lou Black's Living Room in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and took a starring role in Finian's Rainbow at the Cocoanut Grove. In March 1953, she had been named "Miss Optometry" by the New York State Association of Optometrists.

Hamilton's Broadway career included the musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Beginning in November 1963, she joined the road production of the show and remained with it through mid-1964. In 1965, she returned to television with a guest-starring appearance on Bewitched, playing the title character in the episode "Pleasure O'Reilly." The following year, producer Henry G. Saperstein cast her in The War of the Gargantuas, a Japanese kaiju film in which she appeared as a singer billed as a "special guest star," performing the song "The Words Get Stuck in My Throat," a number later covered by Devo. Her final onscreen credit was a 1967 episode of The Virginian.

In her personal life, Hamilton became engaged to Adolph Zukor II, grandson of film mogul Adolph Zukor and an employee in the publicity and foreign departments at Paramount Pictures, though she called off the engagement in March 1959 while filming The Unforgiven in Durango, Mexico. In February 1962, she married director Dave Geisel, whom she had met on the set of The Garry Moore Show, a program produced by her brother Joe. The couple had a daughter, Marie, in 1963, separated the following year, and divorced in June 1965. Geisel died in 1969. Hamilton subsequently married Beverly Hills lawyer Donald Thorman Rosenfeld in February 1968, and the couple had a daughter, Dana, in October 1968. Following her retirement from film and television, Hamilton continued performing in regional theater until her death. In July 2022, she was profiled in Classic Images, with her daughters and former co-stars reflecting on her career.