Zina Bethune

Zina Bianca Bethune (February 17, 1945 – February 12, 2012) was an American actress, dancer, and choreographer born on Staten Island, New York. Her mother, Ivy Bethune, was a Russian-born actress from Sevastopol who worked in the Superman radio series and later appeared in Father Murphy as Miss Tuttle and in General Hospital as Abigail.

Bethune's training in the performing arts began early. At age six she enrolled in George Balanchine's School of American Ballet, and that same year she took on her first professional acting role, a small part in the off-Broadway production Monday's Heroes, staged by Stella Holt at the Greenwich Mews Theater. By the time she was fourteen, she was performing with the New York City Ballet, dancing the role of Clara in Balanchine's 1955 production of The Nutcracker.

Her Broadway career spanned more than three decades, from 1956 to 1989, and included appearances in the musical The Most Happy Fella and Grand Hotel. She was also part of the original cast of The Most Happy Fella as a child performer. During the same period, Bethune established a significant presence in American television. She played the first Robin Lang on The Guiding Light from May 1956 to April 1958, and in October 1958 portrayed Amy March in a CBS musical adaptation of Little Women. Columnist Dick Kleiner praised her 1958 television performance in This Property Is Condemned, describing it as a shatteringly beautiful portrayal of the Tennessee Williams heroine. She went on to play nurse Gail Lucas in the series The Nurses from 1962 to 1965, and made appearances in numerous other programs, among them Route 66, The Judy Garland Show, Dr. Kildare, Gunsmoke, Hollywood Squares, The Invaders, and Emergency!

Bethune also built a film career alongside her stage and television work. In 1960 she appeared in Sunrise at Campobello, playing President Franklin D. Roosevelt's daughter. In 1967 she starred as the Girl opposite Harvey Keitel in Who's That Knocking at My Door, the debut feature film of director Martin Scorsese.

Away from performance, Bethune devoted considerable energy to arts education and accessibility. She had been diagnosed with scoliosis at age eleven and also lived with hip dysplasia, experiences that informed her commitment to working with disabled students. In 1980 she founded Dance Outreach, later renamed Infinite Dreams, which by 2012 was enrolling approximately 8,000 disabled children in dance-related programs across Southern California. The following year, in 1981, she established Bethune Theatredanse, a nonprofit dance and drama company now known as Theatre Bethune, which toured internationally and performed at the White House.

Bethune died on February 12, 2012, four days before her sixty-seventh birthday, after being struck in an apparent hit-and-run crash in Griffith Park, Los Angeles, while attempting to assist an injured opossum.