Odette Myrtil

Odette Myrtil, born Odette Laure Clotilde Quignarde on June 28, 1898, in Paris, France, was a French-born American actress, singer, and violinist whose stage career spanned from 1915 to 1959 on Broadway, with additional work in film, television, and on stages across London, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Paris. The daughter of two stage actors, she studied violin at a boarding school in Brussels and began performing the instrument professionally at the age of 13. Her parents' theatrical background and her early musical training laid the foundation for a career that would draw on all three of her performing disciplines.

At 16, Myrtil traveled to the United States to appear in the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway as one of the Ziegfeld Girls, marking her first Broadway credit in 1915. The following year she moved to London, where she achieved significant success in the West End production of the 1916 musical revue The Bing Boys Are Here. She spent the years that followed performing on the London stage and in vaudeville productions across major European cities before returning to New York City in 1923 as a vaudeville entertainer at the Palace Theatre, where she established her first substantial American following.

Throughout the late 1920s and into the early 1930s, Myrtil became a fixture of the Broadway stage, regularly appearing in productions that showcased both her singing and her violin playing. Her Broadway credits during this period included the revue Broadway Nights and the musical The Red Mill, among others. Her most celebrated stage achievement came in 1931, when she played the role of Odette in Jerome Kern's musical The Cat and the Fiddle, a production written specifically as a vehicle for her talents. Following that triumph, her Broadway appearances became less frequent, though she returned periodically over the following decades. Later credits included the musical Maggie and Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer's musical Saratoga in 1959. During the early 1950s she also spent several years portraying Bloody Mary in the original run of Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific, succeeding Juanita Hall in the role.

Myrtil's screen career began in 1923 with an appearance as a dancer in the film Squibs M.P. Her first speaking role came in the 1936 film Dodsworth, in which she played Renée De Penable. Over the following decades she appeared in a total of 28 feature films, with the bulk of her film work concentrated between the mid-1930s and the mid-1950s. Specializing in character roles and frequently employed for her abilities as a singer, her film credits included Kitty Foyle (1940), Out of the Fog (1941), I Married an Angel (1942), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), The Palm Beach Story (1942), Uncertain Glory (1944), Devotion (1946), The Fighting Kentuckian (1949), and Madame Darville in Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951). She appeared as herself in the 1954 film The Last Time I Saw Paris, performing the title song on camera, and made her final film appearance again as herself in Hot Pants Holiday (1972). In addition to acting, she worked as a costume designer for nine motion pictures between 1944 and 1950. Her sole television credit was a 1953 episode of Studio One in Hollywood titled "The Paris Feeling."

In her later years, Myrtil settled in New Hope, Pennsylvania, where from 1955 to 1958 she managed The Playhouse Inn, situated adjacent to the Bucks County Playhouse. From 1961 to 1976 she operated the New Hope restaurant Chez Odette, which subsequently continued under new ownership as Odette's Restaurant. She was married twice during her lifetime, first for eight years to vaudeville performer Robert Adams and later to film director and producer Stanley Logan. Myrtil died on November 18, 1978, in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, at the age of 80.