Portia Nelson

Portia Nelson, born Betty Mae Nelson on May 27, 1920, in Brigham City, Utah, was an American singer, songwriter, actress, and author who built a career spanning cabaret performance, Broadway, film, television, and writing. She died on March 6, 2001.

Nelson acquired her stage name in the mid-1940s while working in Los Angeles, where friends began calling her Portia after the radio soap opera Portia Faces Life, which she followed devotedly. During that period she held secretarial positions at the publicity department of United Artists Pictures and for film director André de Toth. Her vocal abilities became known on the lot, and actress Jane Russell, who encountered Nelson performing songs at a studio piano, encouraged her to pursue singing professionally. Nelson later served as Russell's vocal coach.

Her early cabaret work began in 1949 at the Café Gala on Hollywood's Sunset Strip, where she caught the attention of Herbert Jacoby, co-owner of the Blue Angel in Manhattan. Nelson relocated to New York in January 1950 and soon appeared on the Blue Angel's performance bills, sharing rosters over the following years with Carol Channing, Pearl Bailey, Harry Belafonte, Johnny Mathis, and others. She performed at the Blue Angel on and off until 1959, with pianist William Roy serving as her accompanist in the venue's front lounge. In 1951 she also appeared at the New York lounge Celeste, accompanied by pianist and songwriter Bart Howard, where she performed material that would later appear on her album Let Me Love You: Portia Nelson Sings the Songs of Bart Howard, including the song eventually retitled "Fly Me to the Moon." Nelson championed Howard's work throughout her career.

Her recorded debut came in 1953 with Love Songs for a Late Evening, released by Columbia's Masterworks division. Nelson also participated in a series of Columbia recordings of classic musicals produced by Goddard Lieberson, contributing to albums of Roberta, The Boys from Syracuse, On Your Toes, and Oklahoma. A recording of Noël Coward's Bitter Sweet, featuring Nelson alongside Robert Rounseville, was never released after Coward withheld his approval.

Nelson's Broadway career began in 1954 when she originated the role of Miss Minerva Oliver in The Golden Apple, John Latouche's musical adaptation of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. The production opened off-Broadway at the Phoenix Theatre before transferring to Broadway's Alvin Theatre, where it ran from April through August of that year. The following year she contributed material to the Broadway revue Almost Crazy, which ran for 16 performances in 1955. Beyond New York, Nelson performed at cabarets including the Bon Soir and Downstairs at the Upstairs in New York, the Colony in London, and Bricktop's in Rome. In 1959 she began hosting a musical radio program, Sunday in New York, produced by Allen Ludden.

As the cabaret scene declined, Nelson moved to Los Angeles in 1960, where she worked as a writer of special musical material for performers including Carol Burnett, Debbie Reynolds, Marlene Dietrich, and Julie Andrews, and as a vocal coach to actors including Rod Steiger. Her acting career during this period became associated, as she noted inadvertently, with roles as nuns. In 1965 she played Sister Berthe in the film version of The Sound of Music, a character who sabotages a Nazi vehicle to protect the von Trapp family. The following year she appeared as Sister Elizabeth in The Trouble with Angels, and in 1967 she played Sister Benedict in an episode of the television western The Big Valley. She also appeared in the film Doctor Dolittle and served as consulting producer and writer for the 1969 television special Debbie Reynolds and the Sound of Children. During her Los Angeles years she studied painting with Richard McKenzie, a celebrity portraitist and art teacher who was Fred Astaire's son-in-law. In 1970 she coached Rock Hudson vocally for his album Rock, Gently: Rock Hudson Sings the Songs of Rod McKuen. Actor and novelist Tom Tryon cast her as Mrs. Rowe in the 1972 film adaptation of his thriller The Other.

Nelson returned to New York around 1971 and made a formal singing comeback in 1976 with an engagement at the Manhattan club Brothers & Sisters, followed by appearances at The Ballroom, Ted Hook's OnStage, Freddy's Supper Club, and the Mocambo in San Francisco. From May through November 1976 she played Therese in the touring company of The Baker's Wife, a musical by Stephen Schwartz and Joseph Stein that closed in Washington, D.C. before reaching Broadway. She continued acting in television, taking on roles in the soap operas The Doctors and All My Children, where she played the recurring role of nanny Rachel Gurney, and appeared in an episode of the sitcom Chico and the Man and in the 1980 film Can't Stop the Music.

Nelson was also the author of There's a Hole in My Sidewalk: The Romance of Self-Discovery, a book of poetic writing that became widely used in twelve-step programs.