Fifi D'Orsay

Fifi D'Orsay
Born Marie-Rose Angelina Yvonne Lussier
(1904-04-16)April 16, 1904
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Died December 2, 1983(1983-12-02) (aged 79)
Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital
Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Cause of death Cancer
Resting place Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California
Occupation actress, singer
Years active 1929-1973
Spouse(s) Maurice Hill

Fifi D'Orsay (April 16, 1904 – December 2, 1983) was a Canadian-born actress.[1]

Biography

Fifi d'Orsay was born Marie-Rose Angelina Yvonne Lussier in Montreal. As a young typist filled with the desire to become an actress, she went to New York City. There, she found work in the Greenwich Village Follies after an audition in which she sang the song "Yes! We Have No Bananas' in French. In a burst of creativity, she told the play's director she was from Paris, France, where she had worked in the Folies Bergère. The show's impressed director hired her, billing her as "Mademoiselle Fifi".

While working in the show, she became involved with Ed Gallagher, a veteran actor who joined her in putting together a vaudeville act. Gallagher was half of the successful Broadway comedy team of Gallagher and Shean, and coached his protegee in the ways of show business.

After touring in vaudeville, she headed west to Hollywood. There, she adopted the surname "D'Orsay" (after a favorite perfume) and began a career in movies, often cast as the naughty French girl from "gay Paris".

While never a superstar, she worked hard at her craft, headlining with the likes of Bing Crosby and Buster Crabbe. For years, she kept alternating her appearances in film with continued performances in vaudeville and when age put an end to the glamour roles, she readily took jobs in television, including two appearances each on ABC's Adventures in Paradise (including as a Mother Superior in the 1960 episode "Castaways"), the CBS legal drama, Perry Mason in the 1961 episode 'The Case of the Grumbling Grandfather', and on the CBS sitcom, Pete and Gladys. She was a contestant in the February 23, 1956 television edition of Groucho Marx's You Bet Your Life. At the age of sixty-seven, she returned to the stage in the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical, Follies.

Fifi D'Orsay died from cancer on December 2, 1983 at the age of seventy-nine at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles.[1] She was interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.

In the news

The San Francisco Call-Bulletin (January 26, 1931) - "Fifi Goes for Ride at Sea" - Hollywood (AP) - "Fifi Dorsay, "ou-la-la" girl of the films, is taking an ocean voyage today at which she is as surprised and shocked as the studio directors of the film she has been making. Saturday night she went to San Pedro and boarded the Dutch steamship Drechtdyk to bid some friends adieu. The steamship sailed at 9 o'clock, and some time later, when she went to the deck, she saw the ocean where the gangplank had been. The next stop is Cristobal, Canal Zone, February 4, her radio message to the studio today revealed."

Partial filmography

Those Three French Girls (1930)

See also

References

  1. 1 2 United Press International (December 4, 1983). "Fifi d'Orsay, Movie Actress; Played French Flirts in 30's". New York Times. Retrieved 2013-12-23. Fifi d'Orsay, the French Bombshell of 1930's motion pictures who was never able to visit France, has died at the age of 79. Miss d'Orsay was ill with cancer for several months before her death Friday at the Motion Picture and Television Country Hospital in suburban Woodland Hills.
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