Mitzi Gaynor

Mitzi Gaynor, born Francesca Marlene de Czanyi von Gerber in Chicago, Illinois, on September 4, 1931, was an American actress, singer, and dancer who worked across film, television, stage, and live performance for more than six decades. She died on October 17, 2024, in Los Angeles at age 93.

Gaynor's father, Henry de Czanyi von Gerber, was a violinist, cellist, and music director of Hungarian descent; her mother, Pauline, was a dancer. The family relocated from Chicago to Elgin, Illinois, then to Detroit, and eventually to Hollywood when Gaynor was eleven. She trained as a ballerina from childhood and began performing in the corps de ballet before joining the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera company at age thirteen, where she sang and danced. Through her father's second marriage, she became stepsister to antiwar activist Donald W. Duncan.

At seventeen, Gaynor signed a seven-year contract with 20th Century Fox. Her film debut came in the 1950 musical My Blue Heaven, in which Betty Grable and Dan Dailey starred and she appeared in a supporting role. Fox subsequently gave her a starring part as Lotta Crabtree in the musical biopic Golden Girl (1951). She appeared in the 1952 anthology comedy We're Not Married! and received top billing in the 1952 musical Bloodhounds of Broadway, which earned $2 million at the box office. Fox also cast her as Eva Tanguay in The I Don't Care Girl (1952) and as the female lead in Down Among the Sheltering Palms (1953) and Three Young Texans (1954). Her most commercially successful film during her Fox years was Irving Berlin's There's No Business Like Show Business (1954), in which she was billed after Ethel Merman, Donald O'Connor, Marilyn Monroe, Dan Dailey, and Johnnie Ray. A Fox executive had determined that her birth surname sounded like the name of a delicatessen, and the studio devised the professional name Mitzi Gaynor using the same initials.

On November 18, 1954, Gaynor married Jack Bean, a talent agent and public relations executive for MCA, in San Francisco. Bean subsequently left MCA, founded his own publicity firm, Bean and Rose, and managed her career. The couple lived on North Arden Drive in Beverly Hills and later, from 1960, in another Beverly Hills home they acquired together. They had no children. Bean died of pneumonia on December 4, 2006, at age 84, after fifty-two years of marriage.

Following her departure from Fox, Gaynor worked at Paramount, where she appeared in the 1956 remake of Anything Goes alongside Bing Crosby, Donald O'Connor, and Zizi Jeanmaire, a film loosely based on the Cole Porter, P. G. Wodehouse, and Guy Bolton musical. Paramount also cast her in The Birds and the Bees (1956), in a role originated by Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve (1941), and in The Joker Is Wild (1957), a biopic of Joe E. Lewis starring Frank Sinatra, in which she played the female lead. In 1957 she appeared in MGM's Les Girls, directed by George Cukor, alongside Gene Kelly and Kay Kendall.

Gaynor's most internationally recognized film role was Ensign Nellie Forbush in the Rodgers and Hammerstein adaptation South Pacific (1958). The performance earned her a nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture Comedy or Musical at the 1959 ceremony. She followed that film with Happy Anniversary (1959), co-starring David Niven, and Surprise Package (1960), a musical comedy thriller directed by Stanley Donen and co-starring Yul Brynner and Noël Coward, whose theme song was written by Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn. Gaynor performed that song in a duet with Coward in the film. Her final film role of that period was For Love or Money (1963), starring Kirk Douglas.

On February 16, 1964, Gaynor appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show between two sets performed by the Beatles during their second appearance on the program. She performed a nine-minute segment from the stage of the Deauville Hotel in Miami Beach, singing "Too Darn Hot" and a blues medley. At the 1967 Academy Awards ceremony, she sang the theme from the film Georgy Girl, a number she later incorporated into her concert repertoire. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Gaynor starred in nine television specials that collectively received sixteen Emmy nominations. She recorded two albums for Verve Records — Mitzi and Mitzi Gaynor Sings the Lyrics of Ira Gershwin — and also recorded the title song from Happy Anniversary for the Top Rank label. During her nightclub years, she developed and rehearsed her Las Vegas routines at The Cave in Vancouver, British Columbia, returning to the city annually for several weeks each year. During the 1990s, she served as a featured columnist for The Hollywood Reporter.

In 1989, Gaynor appeared on Broadway in the musical Anything Goes, a stage credit that connected her return to the property she had first encountered in its 1956 film adaptation. Her one-woman show Razzle Dazzle: My Life Behind the Sequins toured the United States and Vancouver from 2009 through 2014, including a two-week engagement in New York City. On November 18, 2008, City Lights Pictures released the documentary Mitzi Gaynor Razzle Dazzle: The Special Years, which was broadcast on public television and released on DVD; it featured digitally remastered material from her television specials alongside interviews with colleagues including Bob Mackie, Carl Reiner, Kristin Chenoweth, Rex Reed, and Kelli O'Hara.

Gaynor has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6288 Hollywood Boulevard, recognizing her contribution to the motion picture industry.