Mary Healy, Actress and Singer, Dies at 96
She was not on the list.
She teamed with her late husband, Peter Lind Hayes, for a
comedy-musical act that spanned five decades and everything from radio to the
stage.
Mary Healy, an actress and singer who teamed with Peter Lind
Hayes for a husband-and-wife comedy act that sparkled on the radio and television,
in films and on the stage for more than 50 years, has died. She was 96.
Healy died on Tuesday of natural causes in Calabasas,
Calif., publicist Wendy Morris announced.
Healy and Lind starred in the 1953 musical fantasy film The
5,000 Fingers of Dr. T., written by Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) and produced by
Stanley Kramer. Their 1958 Broadway comedy Who Was That Lady I Saw You With?
was produced by Leland Hayward, who a year later produced The Sound of Music
for the stage.
For several years in the early 1960s, the couple hosted a
popular weekday morning radio program on New York station WOR, broadcast from
the basement of their suburban home in New Rochelle, N.Y. They replicated their
home for the set of their 1960-61 NBC sitcom Peter Loves Mary in which they
played a showbiz couple and a guest-star would come over for dinner and display
their talents.
Healy also appeared with her husband on two shows of the
early 1950s, The Peter Lind Show and The Star of the Family. They were frequent
guests on such TV game shows as What's My Line? and often stepped in for Arthur
Godfrey to host his TV shows.
Healy and Lind married in 1940 and performed nearly
exclusively together until his death in April 1998.
Healy was born in New Orleans on April 14, 1918, and won a
Miss New Orleans beauty pageant in 1935. She was discovered by a 20th Century
Fox talent scout while singing in the historic Blue Room of the Roosevelt Hotel
in the city and made her movie debut in Josette (1938). Her first significant
role came opposite Tyrone Power and ice-skating star Sonja Henie in Second
Fiddle (1939).
Healy starred in and sang the title song of the film Star
Dust (1940). That year, she met Hayes while he was performing with his mother,
vaudevillian Grace Hayes, at the Grace Hayes Lodge in North Hollywood. The
couple also starred in the musical comedy Zis Boom Bah (1941), and she appeared
in the 1942 films The Yanks Are Coming (1942) and Strictly in the Groove.
She made her stage debut in 1945 on Broadway in the musical
revue Count Me In, co-written by Walter Kerr, and appeared in the play Common
Ground that year. In 1946, she starred as Indian princess Madam Aouda opposite
Orson Welles in the Mercury Theater Broadway extravaganza Around the World.
Hayes and Healy were the original singers of the Chevrolet
jingle “See the U.S.A. in Your Chevrolet," first performed on the 1949-50
CBS variety show Inside U.S.A. With Chevrolet. (Dinah Shore is most famous for
performing the tune.)
They published two memoirs, Twenty-Five Minutes From
Broadway (1961) and Moments to Remember With Peter and Mary — Our Life in Show
Business From Vaudeville to Video (2014). The couple made their home in Las
Vegas after headlining at the Sands Hotel 14 times over the years, and she was
inducted into the Nevada Entertainment/Artist Hall of Fame at UNLV in 2006.
Survivors include her daughter, actress Cathy Lind Hayes,
son Peter Michael Hayes and a grandchild.
Select filmography
Year Title Role Notes
1938 Josette Uncredited Film
debut
1938 Thanks for
Everything Uncredited
1939 Second Fiddle
Jean Varick
1939 20,000 Men a
Year Joan Marshall
1939 Elsa
Maxwell's Hotel for Women Vocalist
1940 Star Dust Mary Andrews
1940 He Married
His Wife Doris
1941 Hard Guy Julie Kavanaugh
1941 Ride, Kelly,
Ride Entertainer
1941 Zis Boom Bah Mary Healy With
Peter Lind Hayes and his mother Grace Hayes
1942 Strictly in
the Groove Sally Monroe
1942 The Yanks are
Coming Rita Edwards
1953 The 5,000
Fingers of Dr. T. Heloise
Collins With Peter Lind Hayes;
co-written by Theodore Geisel
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