Rita Morley

Rita Morley, born Rita Imogene Gann on October 10, 1927, in West Hartford, Connecticut, was an American performer whose career spanned radio, television, film, and Broadway. She died on June 28, 1997. The daughter of Harry Gann and Minnie Minerva Sybil Gann (née Horowitz), she grew up at 116 Foxcroft Road in West Hartford. She adopted the stage name Rita Morley — drawn from her brother's surname — because Rita Gann was considered too close to the name of actress Rita Gam. She attended the Julius Hartt College of Music and subsequently joined its faculty as a teacher.

Morley's performing career began exceptionally early. At six years old she appeared on a children's radio program on WDRC, and by age nine she was hosting her own regular radio variety show on WTIC. During her high school years she served as a pianist for the Bridgeport Symphony Orchestra. In the early 1950s she appeared on the television program Fairmeadows USA, and throughout the 1950s and 1960s she had roles on the soap operas As the World Turns, The Edge of Night, and The Secret Storm. She also appeared as a guest panelist on What's My Line and was later cast in the television series Texas. Her frequent appearances in commercials for the beauty and cosmetics company Coty Inc. during the 1950s earned her the designation America's Most Televised Girl. In film, she appeared in The Flesh Eaters in 1964.

On Broadway, Morley replaced Neva Patterson in the role of the wife in The Seven Year Itch, marking her debut on the New York stage. She later appeared in The Impossible Years in 1965. Beyond performing, she was a board member of both the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists and the Screen Actors Guild. Writing under the name Rita Morley Harvey, she authored Those Wonderful, Terrible Years: George Heller and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, published by Southern Illinois University Press in 1996, a history of the union's struggle with the blacklisting of suspected Communists during the 1950s. On November 24, 1957, she married actor Kenneth Harvey at Temple Beth Israel in West Hartford.