Alice Ghostley, a television staple for nearly forty years as a character actress, movie actress, and Tony-winning Broadway actress has died:
Alice Ghostley, the Tony Award-winning comedic actress and singer who specialized in playing ditsy ladies and was best known on television for her supporting roles as Esmeralda on “Bewitched” and Bernice on “Designing Women,” died Friday. She was 81.
Ghostley died at her home in Studio City after a long battle with colon cancer and a series of strokes, said Jim Pinkston, a longtime friend.
Ghostley made her Broadway debut in “Leonard Sillman’s New Faces of 1952,” the hit revue in which she received critical acclaim for singing the satirical send-up “The Boston Beguine,” which became her signature song.
“She was just so wonderful,” said Miles Kreuger, president of the Los Angeles-based Institute of the American Musical, who saw “New Faces of 1952” repeatedly and recalls Ghostley singing “The Boston Beguine.”
“There was nothing glamorous about her,” he said. “She was rather plain and had a splendid singing voice, and the combination of the well-trained, splendid singing voice and this kind of dowdy homemaker character was so incongruous and so charming.”
Ghostley won the Tony Award for best featured actress in a play in 1965 for “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window.”
She also received a Tony nomination two years earlier for various characterizations in the 1962-63 Broadway comedy “The Beauty Part” with Bert Lahr.
“She was an exceptional actress,” said Kaye Ballard, a longtime friend who appeared with Ghostley as the wicked stepsisters in a 1957 television production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Cinderella,” starring Julie Andrews.
She will be missed