| Rose Marie | |
|---|---|
| Born | Rose Marie Mazetta August 15, 1923 New York City, New York, U.S. |
| Occupation | Actress, singer |
| Years active | 1926–present |
Rose Marie (born August 15, 1923) is an American actress. As a child performer she had a successful singing career as Baby Rose Marie.
A veteran of vaudeville, Rose Marie's career includes film, records, theater, night clubs, and television. Her most famous role was television comedy writer Sally Rogers on the CBS situation comedy The Dick Van Dyke Show. She later portrayed Myrna Gibbons on CBS's The Doris Day Show and was also a frequent panelist on the game show Hollywood Squares.
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Rose Marie Mazetta was born in New York City, New York, to Italian-American Frank Mazzetta and Polish-American Stella Gluszcak. At the age of three, she started performing under the name "Baby Rose Marie." At five, Marie became a radio star on NBC and made a series of films.
Rose Marie in her teenage years was a nightclub performer before becoming a radio comedian. She was billed then as "The Darling of the Airwaves." According to her autobiography, Hold the Roses,[1] she was assisted in her career by many members of organized crime, including Al Capone and Bugsy Siegel. She performed at the opening night of the Flamingo Hotel which was built by Siegel.[2]
At her height of fame as a child singer (late 1929–1934), she had her own radio show, made numerous records, and was featured in a number of Paramount films and shorts. In 1929, the five- or six-year-old singer made a Vitaphone sound short titled "Baby Rose Marie the Child Wonder," (now restored and available in the Warner Brothers DVD set of The Jazz Singer). For her first recording session, in 1932, she was accompanied by Fletcher Henderson's Orchestra. She continued to appear in films through the mid-1930s, making shorts and a feature, International House with W. C. Fields, for Paramount.
In the 1960–1961 season, Rose Marie co-starred with Shirley Bonne, Elaine Stritch, Jack Weston, Raymond Bailey, and Stubby Kaye in the CBS sitcom My Sister Eileen. She played Bertha, a friend of the Sherwood sisters, Ruth, a magazine writer, played by Stritch, and Eileen, an aspiring actress, Bonne's role.
After starring for all five seasons of The Dick Van Dyke Show (in the role originally played by Sylvia Miles in the pilot episode), Rose Marie co-starred on CBS's The Doris Day Show as Doris Martin's friend and co-worker, Myrna Gibbons. She later had a semi-regular seat in the upper center square on the original version of Peter Marshall's Hollywood Squares, alongside her friend and longtime Van Dyke co-star, Morey Amsterdam. She also appeared on the 1986 syndicated revival.
In the early 1990s, she had a recurring role as Frank Fontana's mother on the CBS sitcom Murphy Brown. She also played Roy Biggins's domineering mother, Eleanor "Bluto" Biggins in the TV series Wings.
Rose Marie and Morey Amsterdam guest-starred together in a February 1996 episode of the NBC sitcom Caroline in the City, shortly before Amsterdam's death in October of that same year. She appeared with the surviving Dick Van Dyke Show cast members in a 2004 reunion special. Rose Marie was especially close to actor Richard Deacon from that show, and offered him the suits left behind when her husband died in 1964, as the two men were of similar height and build. She was married to trumpeter Bobby Guy from 1946 until his death in 1964.[3]
She also appeared in two episodes of the NBC series The Monkees in the mid 1960s.
From 1977–81, she co-starred with Rosemary Clooney, Helen O'Connell and Margaret Whiting in the musical revue 4 Girls 4, which toured the U.S. and appeared on television several times. As of 2011, she continues to occasionally perform.