Mary Ann Mobley, Miss America Turned Actress, Dies at 77
She was not on the list.
The Mississippi native appeared opposite Elvis in a pair of
1965 films and was on dozens of TV shows
Mary Ann Mobley, the dark-haired and wholesome Miss America
who went on to a successful acting career highlighted by two starring turns
opposite Elvis Presley, has died. She was 77.
Mobley, who was married to the late actor and TV host Gary
Collins, died Tuesday morning in her Beverly Hills home after a battle with
breast cancer, execs with Warner Bros. Television said. One of her daughters,
Clancy Collins White, is senior vp drama development at the company.
A native of Brandon, Miss., who attended the University of
Mississippi, the vivacious Mobley was crowned Miss America 1959 and studied
acting with Lee Strasberg. She appeared on Broadway in a 1962 production of the
musical Nowhere to Go But Up, directed by Sidney Lumet, appeared in an L.A.
production of Guys and Dolls and signed a five-year contract with MGM.
She first attracted attention on the small screen when she
appeared on a 1963 episode of Aaron Spelling’s Burke’s Law, which producers
loved to populate with beautiful women making a fuss over suave star Gene
Barry.
In 1965, the Golden Globes named her Most Promising
Newcomer, an award Mobley shared with Mia Farrow and Celia Milius.
After her character dated Presley’s in Girl Happy (1965),
she reteamed with her fellow Mississippian later in the year in Harum Scarum,
in which she starred as a slave girl who is actually the daughter of a king in
the Middle East.
Mobley’s film résumé also includes Get Yourself a College
Girl (1964), Young Dillinger (1965), Jerry Lewis’ Three on a Couch (1966), The
King’s Pirate (1967), The Legend of Custer (1968) and For Singles Only (1968).
She was reportedly the first choice to play Batgirl in the
1960s Batman spinoff, a role that went to Yvonne Craig.
Mobley was among the few Miss America winners to forge a
career in show business; the list also includes Lee Meriwether, Phyllis George,
Bess Myerson and Vanessa Williams. (When she won, the second runner-up was Miss
Oklahoma, Anita Bryant.)
Mobley replaced Dixie Carter as Maggie McKinney, who goes on
to marry Conrad Bain’s character, for the final season of the NBC-ABC series
Diff’rent Strokes in 1985-86.
Mobley also appeared on such shows as Perry Mason, Love,
American Style, Fantasy Island, Ironside, Falcon Crest, The Partridge Family
and Vega$ and was a recurring celebrity panelist on the game show Match Game.
She and Collins were active volunteers and fiercely
committed to numerous worthwhile causes, traveling to Cambodia, Ethiopia,
Mozambique, Somalia, Kenya, Zimbabwe and the Sudan for documentaries meant to
show the plight of homeless and starving children.
Mobley was a member of the National Board of Trustees for
the March of Dimes, The National Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation and the
National Council on Disability. She was an advocate for the Susan G. Komen
Breast Cancer Foundation and for Childhelp (which honored Mobley with the 1999
Woman of the World Award) and served on the National Advisory Board of The
Eudora Welty Foundation.
In recent years, Mobley completed a three-season run at the
Annenberg Theater in Palm Springs in a new musical titled Senior Class and
debuted a cabaret act.
“The University of Mississippi family is saddened by the
passing of Mary Ann Mobley Collins,” said a statement released by Ole Miss. She
was the first woman to be voted into the university's Alumni Hall of Fame, a
group that included her friend from her years at the school, William Faulkner.
Mobley wed Collins in 1967 (it was his second marriage)
after they were introduced on the set of Three on a Couch. He died in 2012.
In addition to her daughter Clancy (and her husband
William), survivors include another daughter, Melissa; son Guy (and his wife,
Michelle); sister Sandra; and grandsons Garrett and Gaston.
Services will be held Monday at Christ United Methodist
Church in Jackson, Miss., with burial at Parkway Funeral Home.
Filmography
Film
1964: Get Yourself
a College Girl
1965: Girl Happy
1965: Harum Scarum
1965: Young
Dillinger
1966: Three on a
Couch
1967: The King's
Pirate
1968: Istanbul
Express [de]
1968: For Singles
Only
1974: The Girl on
the Late, Late Show
Television
1960 Be Our Guest (CBS daytime TV show)
1964: Burke's Law
1964/66: Perry
Mason
1965/66 Run for
Your Life
1966: Mission:
Impossible
1966: The Man from
U.N.C.L.E.
1967: The Legend
of Custer
1967: The
Virginian
1969–73 Love,
American Style (4 episodes)
1969: Ironside
1972: Search
1973: The
Partridge Family
1973–77 Match Game
1974–77
Tattletales
1978–84: Fantasy
Island (8 episodes)
1978–85: The Love
Boat (3 episodes)
1979: General
Hospital
1985–86 Diff'rent
Strokes
1980: Vega$
1984: Hotel
1986: Password
1988: Falcon Crest
(4 episodes)
1990: Designing
Women
1992: Hearts Afire
1999: Sabrina, the
Teenage Witch
2003: Dead Like Me
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