Phyllis Newman

Phyllis Newman (March 19, 1933 – September 15, 2019) was an American actress, singer, and book writer whose Broadway career spanned from 1952 to 2009. Born in Jersey City, New Jersey, she was one of three daughters of a Jewish immigrant couple. Her mother, Rachel Gottlieb, originally from Lithuania, performed professionally as Marvelle the Fortune Teller, while her father, Sigmund Newman, from Warsaw, billed himself as Gabel the Graphologist and hypnotist; both worked Atlantic City boardwalk amusements. Newman began performing at age four, impersonating Carmen Miranda at her father's encouragement. She attended Lincoln High School, where classmates voted her "Future Hollywood Star," and had two sisters, Shirley Porte and Elaine Sandaufer.

Newman made her Broadway debut in Wish You Were Here in 1952. Her subsequent stage credits include Moonbirds, Bells Are Ringing, Pleasures and Palaces, The Apple Tree, The Prisoner of Second Avenue, Awake and Sing!, and Broadway Bound, for which she received a Tony Award nomination in 1987. Her most celebrated Broadway role came in Subways Are for Sleeping, in which she played Martha Vail and won the 1962 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical. She also starred in On the Town and Angela Lansbury – A Celebration.

Newman played Stella Deems in the 1985 staged concert version of Follies at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center, a production that yielded both a cast recording and a filmed documentary capturing her performance of "Who's That Woman?" She reprised the role in the 1998 revival of Follies at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey. In June 1979, Newman collaborated with Arthur Laurents on the one-woman show The Madwoman of Central Park West, produced by Fritz Holt and featuring songs by Leonard Bernstein, Jerry Bock, John Kander, Martin Charnin, Betty Comden, Adolph Green, Edward Kleban, Fred Ebb, Sheldon Harnick, Peter Allen, Barry Manilow, Carole Bayer Sager, and Stephen Sondheim. The production ran for 86 performances at the 22 Steps Theatre in New York City, and Newman served as its book writer. She also received two Drama Desk Award nominations over the course of her career.

On television, Newman appeared as early as 1957 in an episode of the crime drama Decoy and in 1960 was cast as Doris Hudson on the CBS summer replacement series Diagnosis: Unknown, opposite Patrick O'Neal. She became a prominent television personality through the 1960s and 1970s as a frequent panelist on the game shows What's My Line?, To Tell the Truth, and Match Game, and was a recurring guest on NBC's The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, becoming the first woman to guest host that program. She created the recurring role of former madame Renée Divine Buchanan on the ABC soap opera One Life to Live and was a regular on the primetime series 100 Centre Street and the satirical series That Was The Week That Was. Additional television appearances include The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Burke's Law, Murder She Wrote, The Wild Wild West, The Equalizer, Thirtysomething, and a 2004 episode of Fox's The Jury.

Newman's feature film work began with an uncredited role as Juanita Badger in Picnic (1955), followed by an uncredited appearance in The Vagabond King (1956). Subsequent film credits include Let's Rock (1958), Bye Bye Braverman (1968), To Find a Man (1972), Mannequin (1987), Only You (1994), The Beautician and the Beast (1997), A Price Above Rubies (1998), A Fish in the Bathtub (1999), and The Human Stain (2003). In 1968 she recorded the album Those Were the Days for Sire Records, released in England as Phyllis Newman's World of Music on London Records.

In 1995, Newman founded the Phyllis Newman Women's Health Initiative of the Actors Fund of America and subsequently hosted its annual fundraising gala, Nothing Like a Dame, which raised more than $3.5 million and served 2,500 women in the entertainment industry. In 2009, she received the inaugural Isabelle Stevenson Award, a special Tony Award recognizing an individual from the theatre community for humanitarian work. Newman was married to lyricist and playwright Adolph Green from 1960 until his death in 2002; together they had two children, journalist Adam Green and singer-songwriter Amanda Green. Her memoir, Just in Time — Notes from My Life, chronicles her career, her marriage to Green, and her experience with cancer. Newman died on September 15, 2019, at the age of 86, from complications of a lung disorder.