{"id":822141,"date":"2026-07-24T02:30:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-24T02:30:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/822141\/"},"modified":"2026-07-24T02:30:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-24T02:30:10","slug":"anne-russell-dead-hello-dolly-mame-actress-was-103","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/822141\/","title":{"rendered":"Anne Russell Dead: \u2018Hello, Dolly!,\u2019 \u2018Mame\u2019 Actress Was 103"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tAnne Russell, one of the first actresses to star as composer-lyricist Jerry Herman<\/a>\u2019s musical comedy queens in both Hello, Dolly! and Mame, died Tuesday at the Actors Fund Home in Englewood, New Jersey, her friend Ted Seifman announced. She was 103.<\/p>\n

\n\tAfter serving as an understudy in a City Center revival of Pal Joey in 1963, Russell made her Broadway<\/a> debut in 1965 in Kander & Ebb\u2019s Flora, the Red Menace, directed by George Abbott and starring Liza Minnelli (who was making her Broadway debut, too).<\/p>\n

\n\tShe began her Hello, Dolly! career that year when she auditioned for Gower Champion and became the standby for Mary Martin, joining the show in Cleveland. She toured for more than two years with the production, standing by for Betty Grable and Ginger Rogers as well, as it played across the country and in Tokyo, Vietnam and South Korea.<\/p>\n

\n\tHer Mame years kicked off with a national tour in 1965, followed by summer engagements, bus & truck tours and stops in Las Vegas, playhouses and dinner theaters.<\/p>\n

\n\tBorn on March 22, 1923, in Raleigh, North Carolina, Russell began in show business singing with local bands.<\/p>\n

\n\tShe moved to New York and became the featured vocalist for the Les Brown and Jerry Wald orchestras while also developing a nightclub act that included comic impressions. Ed Sullivan gave her a rave in his newspaper column, and she would appear twice on his CBS variety program.<\/p>\n

\n\tRussell hired composer-musical director Peter Howard to help with her act, and he helped get her the part of Electra in a 1961 national tour of Gypsy, produced by David Merrick. (Bernadette Peters, then 13, was in the cast at the time.) She later played Tessie Tura in other Gypsy productions.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile with Hello, Dolly! in the Far East, she organized a group of fellow performers called The Rice Paddy Seven to perform at military bases and hospitals. They eventually took it to the Riviera in Las Vegas for 14 shows a week.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tMeanwhile, she coached Dorothy Lamour and Martha Raye in their portrayals of Dolly Levi and also played the matchmaker in various summer theaters and companies.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn 1989, Russell toured with Debbie Reynolds<\/a> in John Bowab\u2019s stage production of The Unsinkable Molly Brown, then worked with her longtime friend alongside Shirley MacLaine, Joan Collins and Elizabeth Taylor<\/a> in the 2001 ABC telefilm These Old Broads, co-written by Carrie Fisher<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\tShe also toured with The Boy Friend, Forty Carats, Never Too Late and Oklahoma!; appeared in productions of Carnival, Shine, A Very Warm May and Anything Goes; did lots of voiceover work for radio and TV commercials; and served as a TV spokesperson for products ranging from beds, bread and banks.<\/p>\n

\n\tA 74-year resident of Manhattan\u2019s Upper West Side, Russell learned to skydive at age 88 and zip-lined for the first time at 90. As a member of the Edwin Forrest Society, she made provisions to donate a portion of her estate to the Entertainment Community Fund, formerly known as The Actors Fund.<\/p>\n

\n\tDonations in her memory can be made to the Actors Fund Home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Anne Russell, one of the first actresses to star as composer-lyricist Jerry Herman\u2019s musical comedy queens in both…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":822142,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[65293,49,48,361,44368,75,11487,18916],"class_list":["post-822141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-broadway","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-celebrities","tag-elizabeth-taylor","tag-entertainment","tag-obituaries","tag-theater"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=822141"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822141\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/822142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=822141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=822141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=822141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}