Actress known for Dick Tracy and Topper
Born: January 26, 1923;
Died: September 27, 2017
ANNE Jeffreys, who has died aged 94, started her professional life as an opera singer and model and during a long acting career worked her way from westerns and thrillers in the 1940s to a 20-year stint on the popular American daytime soap General Hospital from 1984 to 2004.
Decades before Warren Beatty and Madonna reimagined the legendary Dick Tracy comic book series, she was Tess Trueheart, the hero’s girlfriend in Dick Tracy (1945) and Dick Tracy vs Cueball (1946).
And she was a memorable spook – “the ghostess with the moistest” – in the sitcom Topper (1953-55), a spin-off from the 1937 Cary Grant film of the same name, with two mischievous ghosts haunting the stuffy banker who has moved into their house. It was sophisticated comedy for its time, with Stephen Sondheim among the writers.
Born in Goldsboro, North Carolina, in 1923, Jeffreys showed an early aptitude for singing, which was encouraged by her mother. “She heard me sing along with the phonograph when I was six and I guess that started things,” she said.
She trained in voice and joined the New York Municipal Opera Company and sang in La Boheme, La Traviata and Pagliacci at the Carnegie Hall while still in her teens, as well as getting work through a leading modelling agency.
Blessed with looks and a voice, she was soon recruited into the film industry. In 1942 she shared the screen with both Tarzan (Johnny Weissmuller) and Billy the Kid (Buster Crabbe) and got to sing in a film called The Old Homestead, though a rather snooty news item in the San Bernardino County Sun reported that “she still hopes to sing real music some day”.
She appeared with Frank Sinatra in Step Lively (1944), but was not restricted to musicals and lighter material, playing the famous gangster’s moll in Dillinger (1945), with Lawrence Tierney, who would later co-star in Reservoir Dogs (1992), as Dillinger.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s she appeared in several Broadway productions, including taking over the lead in the original production of Kiss Me Kate, the Cole Porter musical based on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew.
Film roles had dried up and she was singing in hotels and nightclubs with her husband Robert Sterling before Topper took the couple to a new audience on television, a medium in which she worked extensively in later years.
Over the years she made guest appearances on numerous hit shows, including Bonanza (1966), The Man from UNCLE (1966) and Battlestar Galactica (1979), in a romantic plot that cast her opposite Fred Astaire. She had the distinction of being his last on-screen dancing partner.
She was David Hasselhoff’s mum in several episodes of Baywatch between 1993 and 1998 and was a wealthy socialite in General Hospital (1984-2004) and its spin-off Port Charles (1999-2003).
She was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960 and received a Golden Boot award in 1997. She was married twice. Her first marriage lasted only a few years and ended in divorce in 1949. Her second husband was the actor Robert Sterling, who played her ghostly spouse in Topper. They had been married for 55 years when he died in 2006. She is survived by three sons.
BRIAN PENDREIGH
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