August 30: Happy Birthday Shirley Booth

[TMC]

https://lebeauleblog.com/2017/08/30/...red-macmurray/

Shirley Booth (1898-1992) began her career working in regional theater. She made her Broadway debut in 1925 in the play Hell’s Bells, which also starred none other than Humphrey Bogart. For the next 25 years or so she was well known to Broadway audiences, if not to the nation at large. She starred the hit play Three Men on a Horse in the mid-thirties, co-starred with Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story, and originated the role of Ruth Sherwood in My Sister Eileen.

In 1949, Booth received a Tony for Best Featured Actress in a Play for Fay Kanin’s Goodbye, My Fancy. She then starred as Lola Delaney in William Inge’s first play, Come Back, Little Sheba, and won her second Tony, for Best Actress in a Play. In 1952, she was the one major member of the Broadway cast asked to return to her role for the feature film adaptation, and won an Oscar for Best Actress in her film debut.


Booth’s film career was very brief, but did include a nomination for a BAFTA Award for About Mrs. Leslie and starring in the film adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker. She won a third Tony for starring in Arthur Laurents’s The Time of the Cuckoo, and continued working on stage until the beginning of the seventies. 1960s television audiences got to know her well as the live-in maid for the Baxter family, Hazel Burke, as she won two Emmys for starring on Hazel and became a Triple Crown of Acting winner. And anyone who knows their Christmas TV specials is familiar with her final acting role, as the voice of Mrs. Claus on The Year Without a Santa Claus.

[TV Guy]

Can you really have much of a happy birthday when you're dead? Oh well, Shirley - if there's a heaven, I hope you're living it up on your b-day!