Mitzi Green

Mitzi Green, born Elizabeth Keno on October 22, 1920, in the Bronx, New York, was an American actress and singer whose career spanned vaudeville, film, Broadway, television, and radio. She died on May 24, 1969, in Huntington Beach, California, at age 48, of cancer. Her parents, Joe Keno and Rosie Green, were Jewish vaudeville performers, and Green made her first stage appearances in their act at age three, billed as Little Mitzi.

Her film career began at Paramount during the early sound era, where she was frequently cast as an outspoken, mischievous child alongside studio stars including Clara Bow, Jack Oakie, Ed Wynn, Leon Errol, and Edna May Oliver. A gifted mimic, Green regularly incorporated celebrity impressions into her screen work. Departing from her usual type, she appeared opposite Jackie Coogan in two Mark Twain adaptations: Tom Sawyer (1930) and Huckleberry Finn (1931). Paramount released her in 1931 as she outgrew child roles. She then moved to RKO, where she played the title role in Little Orphan Annie (1932), based on the comic strip, with Edgar Kennedy as Daddy Warbucks, and appeared as the precocious kid sister in Girl Crazy (1932), the first film adaptation of the George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin stage musical, in which she performed impressions of George Arliss and Edna May Oliver. At fourteen, she took a soubrette role in the independently produced Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round (1934), released through United Artists, after which she left Hollywood for the stage.

Green's Broadway career ran from 1937 to 1961. She made her Broadway debut in the original production of Rodgers and Hart's Babes in Arms (1937), in which she performed "My Funny Valentine" and "The Lady Is a Tramp," both of which later became widely recorded standards. She subsequently appeared in the musical Walk With Music, which featured music by Hoagy Carmichael and lyrics by Johnny Mercer, and starred in Billion Dollar Baby, with a score by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. Additional Broadway credits include Let Freedom Ring and Gypsy.

Green made one more film in 1940, Santa Fe Trail with Errol Flynn, before returning to stage and nightclub work. She married film, stage, and television director Joseph Pevney, with whom she had four children, including son Jeff, who appeared in the 1962 film version of Gypsy. After stepping away from performing to raise her family, she returned to the screen at age thirty-one in two 1952 films: Lost in Alaska, opposite Abbott and Costello, and Bloodhounds of Broadway, which co-starred Mitzi Gaynor. In 1955, she starred in the short-lived NBC television sitcom So This Is Hollywood alongside Virginia Gibson and Gordon Jones, playing Queenie Dugan, a stuntwoman. On radio, she headlined Passport to Romance, a music and comedy program that premiered on the Mutual Broadcasting System on April 5, 1946. For her contributions to the motion picture industry, Green received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6430 Hollywood Boulevard.