Meg Mundy

Margaret Anne Mary Mundy was born on January 4, 1915, in Marylebone, London, to English cellist John Mundy and Australian opera singer Clytie Hine, who had studied at the Elder Conservatorium of Music in Adelaide, South Australia. In 1921, when Mundy was six years old, the family emigrated to the United States. Her father went on to serve as orchestra manager of the Metropolitan Opera, while her mother, after retiring from performing, coached opera singers and musical performers. Her younger brother, John Hine Mundy, became a history professor at Columbia University. Mundy held both English and American identity throughout her life and died on January 12, 2016, at the age of 101, having celebrated her centennial birthday just eight days earlier.

Before establishing herself in the theater, Mundy built a prominent career as a model. In 1940, modeling agency founder Harry Conover named her among the ten highest-earning models in the country, and a newspaper account two years later described her as Manhattan's highest-paid model. She also debuted as a concert singer at Carnegie Hall in 1942. Her Broadway career spanned nearly five decades, from 1934 to 1983, and included appearances in productions such as You Can't Take It With You, The Philadelphia Story, and Little Me.

Mundy's most celebrated stage work came in 1948, when she starred in The Respectful Prostitute at the Cort Theatre, a performance that earned her the Theatre World Award that year. Film star Ann Dvorak later succeeded her in the role. Mundy also took on the lead female role of Mary McLeod in the Broadway production of Detective Story.

Her television work was extensive. From 1972 to 1973 and again from 1975 to 1982, she played wealthy matriarch Mona Aldrich Croft on the daytime drama The Doctors, a role for which she received a Daytime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actress at the 9th Daytime Emmy Awards in 1982. She departed the series three months before it concluded. Additional soap opera credits included the role of Isabelle Alden on the pilot for Loving, the role of Julia, Maeve Stoddard's imperious mother, on Guiding Light, and the role of Eugenia von Voynavitch, wealthy aunt to Dimitri Marrick, on All My Children. She also appeared in an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents as an antiques fancier and in two episodes of Law and Order during the 1990s.

Mundy's film credits included Eyes of Laura Mars and Oliver's Story, both released in 1978, The Bell Jar in 1979, and Ordinary People in 1980, in which she played the mother of Mary Tyler Moore's character. Ordinary People won the Academy Award for Best Picture. She subsequently appeared in The Survivors in 1983, a film starring Walter Matthau and Robin Williams, and in Fatal Attraction and Someone to Watch Over Me, both released in 1987. Mundy was married twice, first to Marc Daniels from 1942 to 1951, and subsequently to Konstantinos Yannopoulos, with whom she had one child.