Dina Merrill
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Nedenia Marjorie Hutton (born December 9, 1925) is an American actress known as Dina Merrill.
Born in New York City, she is the daughter of Wall Street stockbroker Edward Francis Hutton and Post Cereals heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post.
Dina Merill has been in twenty two motion pictures, including Desk Set with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, The Sundowners, Don't Give Up The Ship, Caddyshack II, I'll Take Sweden with Bob Hope, The Young Savages with Burt Lancaster, A Nice Little Bank That Should Be Robbed with Mickey Rooney, Catch Me If You Can, Operation Petticoat with Cary Grant (who later married her cousin, Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton) and Tony Curtis, The Courtship of Eddie's Father with Glenn Ford and Ron Howard, Butterfield 8 with Elizabeth Taylor, A Wedding with Desi Arnaz, jr. and Carol Burnett, True Colors with John Cusack and The Player with Whoopi Goldberg.
Merrill appeared regularly on television in the 1960s. For example, she did a stint as one of the What's My Line? Mystery Guests on the popular Sunday Night CBS-TV program, and later served as a guest panelist on the quiz show.
Dina Merrill has been married three times. Her first husband was Stanley M. Rumbough, Jr., an heir to the Colgate-Palmolive toothpaste fortune and entrepreneur; they married in 1946 and divorced in 1966. They had three children, Stanley Hutton Rumbough, David Post Rumbough (deceased 1973), and Nina Colgate Rumbough. Her second husband was the American actor Cliff Robertson (married 1966, divorced 1986); they had one daughter, Heather Robertson. Her current husband is former actor Ted Hartley; they have been married since 1989. Dina Merrill has six grandchildren; Denia Craig and Welyn Craig by Nina and Charles Stiffler Craig, David (Cole) Colgate Rumbough, Allegra Hutton Rumbough, Siena Post Rumbough, and Kiera Basten Rumbough by Stanley and Leah Jensen.
A corporate remnant named RKO Pictures was purchased by Merrill and Hartley in 1989 with a plan to resurrect it as a motion picture production company.
On April 6, 2005, in New York City, at the Museum of Television and Radio, of which she is a member of the Board of Directors, Ms. Merrill introduced a screening of Budd Schulberg's 1959 TV production What Makes Sammy Run?. She was in this production. Mr. Schulberg was also at the screening.
Dina Merrill is a significant shareholder and director of Lehman Brothers and serves as the chairman of the Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee and is a member of the Bank's Compensation and Benefits Committee. Ms. Merrill is a presidential appointee to the Board of Trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a trustee of the Eugene O'Neill Theater Foundation, a vice president of the New York City Mission Society, and serves on the Board of the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation.
She is also a member of the Board of ORBIS International, a global, nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing blindness through education and transferring the medical skills to treat and prevent blindness in developing countries.
She is a pro-choice Republican.
