January 27 was the birthday of stage star Benay Venuta (Benvenuta Rose Crooke, 1910-1995). Old time movie fans will probably know her best from the movie musicals Annie Get Your Gun (1950, as Dolly Tate, a role she later reprised in the 1966 Broadway revival) and Call Me Mister (1951). In the ’80s, she had a recurring role as Jean Smart’s mother-in-law on Designing Women.
Venuta was a Los Angeles local who’d attended posh schools in Switzerland and London. Trained as a dancer, she got her earliest experience plying her trade in vaudeville and nightclubs. She also seems to have danced in prologues to screenings of the movies The Big Parade and Tip Toes in the late ’20s, and to have been an extra in the silent western The Trail of ’98 (1928).
Venuta’s big moment came in 1935, when she was went in as a replacement for Ethel Merman as Reno Sweeney (the lead) in the original Broadway production of Anything Goes (1935). The same year she was featured in a Vitaphone short called The Film Follies. In the 1938 short Queens of the Air she sings “Thanks for the Memory” (which Bob Hope had also introduced that year), backed by the Vincent Lopez Orchestra. Her subsequent Broadway shows included the original productions of Orchids Preferred (1937), Kiss the Boys Goodbye (1938), By Jupiter (1942), Nellie Bly (1946), Hazel Flagg (1953), and Copper and Brass (1957).
She married movie producer Armand Deutsch in 1939, and was frequently heard on radio throughout the ’40s, on such programs as Duffy’s Tavern, and her own shows The Benay Venuta Hour and the game show Keep Up With the Kids. She had supporting roles in the films Repeat Performance (1947), I, Jane Doe (1948), Easter Parade (1948), Stars and Stripes Forever (1952), Ricochet Romance (1954), and Frank Tashlin’s The Fuzzy Pink Nightgown (1957). From 1952 to 1962 she was married to popular character actor Fred Clark.
IN 1958 Venuta co-starred in a pilot for a tv series called Cool and Lam, created by Perry Mason‘s Erle Stanley Gardner and directed by Jacques Tourneur. She guest starred memorably on That Girl in 1968 (clearly the doing of Danny Thomas, her co-star in Call Me Mister). She also had a small role in Kurt Vonnegut’s amazing 1972 tv movie Between Time and Timbuktu. Her final screen role was a walk-on in Woody Allen’s Bullets Over Broadway (1994).
When not appearing on Broadway or film, radio or television, Venuta filled time with regional and touring theatre productions. Lung cancer took her at age 85.
For more on vaudeville and show biz history, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous.
(Travalanche) 
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