Nanette Fabray

Nanette Fabray, born Ruby Bernadette Nanette Theresa Fabares on October 27, 1920, in San Diego, California, was an American actress, singer, and dancer whose career spanned from vaudeville performances in early childhood through Broadway, film, and television work extending into the 1980s. Her father, Raoul Bernard Fabares, worked as a train conductor, and her mother, Lily Agnes Fabares, was a housewife who played a central role in introducing her daughter to show business. Fabray adopted one of her middle names as her professional first name in honor of an aunt from San Diego, and she was commonly known by the nickname Nan. She died on February 22, 2018.

Fabray's entry into performing came at the age of three, when she made her professional stage debut as Miss New Year's Eve 1923 at the Million Dollar Theater in Los Angeles. She spent much of her childhood working in vaudeville as a dancer and singer under the name Baby Nan, appearing alongside performers such as Ben Turpin. Among her early dance instructors was Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, with whom she studied tap. Despite her extensive early training, Fabray did not consider herself enthusiastic about show business as a young girl, and as an adult she did not advocate for pushing children into performing. She regarded herself primarily as a tap dancer throughout her life. During her teenage years she attended the Max Reinhardt School of the Theatre on a scholarship before enrolling at Hollywood High School, where she participated in the drama program and graduated in 1939, having won the lead in the senior class play over classmate Alexis Smith. She briefly attended Los Angeles Junior College in the fall of 1939 but withdrew within months. Her academic difficulties were later attributed to an undiagnosed hearing impairment; she was eventually diagnosed with conductive hearing loss related to congenital, progressive otosclerosis in her twenties, after an acting teacher encouraged her to have her hearing tested.

At nineteen, Fabray made her feature-film debut appearing as one of Bette Davis's ladies-in-waiting in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex in 1939, followed by two additional Warner Bros. productions that year, the short The Monroe Doctrine and A Child Is Born. She was not offered a long-term studio contract. Her stage career advanced when she joined the Los Angeles production of Meet the People in 1940, which subsequently toured the United States through 1941. During the show's New York run, she performed a number combining the opera aria "Caro nome" from Verdi's Rigoletto with tap dancing at a Madison Square Garden benefit where Eleanor Roosevelt was the main speaker. At that event, host Ed Sullivan mispronounced her surname, prompting her to change the spelling from Fabares to Fabray. Artur Rodziński, conductor of the New York Philharmonic, attended her performance in Meet the People and offered to sponsor operatic vocal training for her at the Juilliard School. She studied opera there with Lucia Dunham in 1941 while simultaneously performing in her first Broadway musical, Cole Porter's Let's Face It!, alongside Danny Kaye and Eve Arden. She withdrew from Juilliard after approximately five months, preferring musical theatre to opera.

Fabray's Broadway career ran from 1940 to 1987 and encompassed a wide range of productions. During the 1940s and early 1950s she appeared in By Jupiter, Bloomer Girl, and High Button Shoes, as well as in Jackpot and My Dear Public. She starred in Love Life, the Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner musical in which she portrayed Susan Cooper, earning the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical in 1949. She also starred in Make a Wish and later in Madam President. Additional Broadway credits include the play No Hard Feelings. After an eleven-year absence from the New York stage, she returned to receive a Tony nomination for her role as Nell Henderson in Mr. President in 1963. She continued touring in musicals for many years, appearing in productions including Wonderful Town and No, No, Nanette.

In 1953, Fabray took on her best-known film role, playing a Betty Comden-like playwright in the MGM musical The Band Wagon alongside Fred Astaire. In the mid-1950s she became a regular on Caesar's Hour, serving as Sid Caesar's comic partner from 1954 to 1956 and winning three Emmy Awards for that work. She had previously appeared as a guest opposite Caesar on Your Show of Shows. Her departure from Caesar's Hour followed a contract dispute stemming from her business manager's demands during negotiations for her third season; she and Caesar did not reconcile until years later. In December 1956 she appeared in the Playhouse 90 episode "The Family Nobody Wanted" with Lew Ayres and Tim Hovey.

In 1961, Fabray starred in 26 episodes of Westinghouse Playhouse, a half-hour sitcom also known as The Nanette Fabray Show or Yes, Yes Nanette, in which the central character was loosely based on her own life as a newlywed with stepchildren. From 1979 to 1984 she played Katherine Romano, the mother of lead character Ann Romano, on the television series One Day at a Time. She also appeared as the mother of Christine Armstrong on the series Coach, a role that placed her opposite her real-life niece Shelley Fabares. She made 13 guest appearances on The Carol Burnett Show and was a panelist on 230 episodes of The Hollywood Squares. Her other television appearances included recurring participation in Password, Match Game, I've Got a Secret, Family Feud, and Let's Make a Deal, as well as guest roles on Burke's Law, Maude, The Love Boat, and Murder, She Wrote. During the PBS program Pioneers of Television: Sitcoms, Mary Tyler Moore credited Fabray with inspiring her trademark comedic crying technique. In 1986, Fabray was cast in the pilot episode of the unsold TBS sitcom Here to Stay.

Beyond her performing career, Fabray was a longtime advocate for the rights of deaf and hearing-impaired people, drawing on her own experience with significant hearing impairment. Her humanitarian work was recognized with the President's Distinguished Service Award and the Eleanor Roosevelt Humanitarian Award.