Nanette Fabray

Nanette Fabray (born Ruby Bernadette Nanette Theresa Fabares; October 27, 1920 – February 22, 2018) was an American actress, singer and dancer.

Fabray was born Ruby Bernadette Nanette Theresa Fabares on October 27, 1920 in San Diego, California to Lily Agnes (McGovern), a housewife, and Raoul Bernard Fabares, a train conductor.

She used one of her middle names, Nanette, as her first name in honor of a beloved aunt from San Diego named Nanette.

Throughout life, she often used the nickname Nan.

Her family resided in Los Angeles, and Fabray's mother was instrumental in introducing her to showbusiness as a child.

At a young age, she studied tap dance with, among others, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson.

She made her professional stage debut as Miss New Year's Eve 1923 at the Million Dollar Theater at the age of three.

She spent much of her childhood appearing in vaudeville productions as a dancer and singer under the name Baby Nan.

She appeared with stars such as Ben Turpin.

Despite her mother's influence, Fabray was not interested in showbusiness as a young girl.

Consequently, as an adult she did not believe in pushing children into performing at a young age.

However, because of her early dance training, Fabray considered herself to be primarily a tap dancer.

Despite a persistent rumor, she was never a regular or recurring guest in the Our Gang series, but she did appear as an extra during a party scene.

Fabray's parents divorced when she was nine, but they continued living together for financial reasons.

During the Great Depression, her mother converted their home into a boarding house, which Fabray and her siblings helped to run, and her main job was ironing clothes.

In her early teenage years, Fabray attended the Max Reinhardt School of the Theatre on a scholarship.

She then attended Hollywood High School, participating in the drama program and graduating in 1939.

She bested classmate Alexis Smith for the lead in the school play during her senior year.

Fabray entered Los Angeles Junior College in the fall of 1939, but she did not fare well and withdrew a few months later.

Fabray experienced difficulty in school because of an undiagnosed hearing impairment.

She was later diagnosed with conductive hearing loss related to congenital, progressive otosclerosis in her twenties after an acting teacher encouraged her to have her hearing tested.

Fabray said of the experience, "It was a revelation to me. All these years I had thought I was stupid, but in reality, I just had a hearing problem."

At the age of 19, Fabray made her feature-film debut as one of Bette Davis's ladies-in-waiting in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939).

She appeared in two additional films that year for Warner Bros., The Monroe Doctrine (short) and A Child Is Born, but was not signed to a long-term studio contract.

She began her career performing in vaudeville as a child and became a musical-theatre actress during the 1940s and 1950s, acclaimed for her role in High Button Shoes (1947) and winning a Tony Award in 1949 for her performance in Love Life.

She next appeared in the stage production Meet the People in Los Angeles in 1940, which then toured the United States in 1940–1941.

In the show, she sang the opera aria "Caro nome" from Giuseppe Verdi's Rigoletto while tap dancing.

During the show's New York run, Fabray was invited to perform the "Caro nome" number for a benefit at Madison Square Garden with Eleanor Roosevelt as the main speaker.

Ed Sullivan was the master of ceremonies for the event and mispronounced her name, prompting her to subsequently change the spelling of her name from Fabares to the more easily pronounced Fabray.

Artur Rodziński, conductor of the New York Philharmonic, saw Fabray's performance in Meet the People and offered to sponsor operatic vocal training for her at the Juilliard School.

She became a successful musical-theatre actress in New York during the 1940s and early 1950s, starring in such productions as By Jupiter (1942), My Dear Public (1943), Jackpot (1944), Bloomer Girl (1946), High Button Shoes (1947), Arms and the Girl (1950) and Make a Wish (1951).

She studied opera at Juilliard with Lucia Dunham in 1941 while performing in her first Broadway musical, Cole Porter's Let's Face It!, with Danny Kaye and Eve Arden.

However, as she preferred performing in musical theatre over opera, she withdrew from the school after about five months.

In 1949, she won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical for her portrayal of Susan Cooper in the Kurt Weill/Alan Jay Lerner musical Love Life.

In the mid-1950s, she served as Sid Caesar's comedic partner on Caesar's Hour, for which she won three Emmy Awards, and appeared with Fred Astaire in the film musical The Band Wagon.

From 1979 to 1984, she played Katherine Romano, the mother of lead character Ann Romano, on the TV series One Day at a Time.

She also appeared as the mother of Christine Armstrong (played by her niece Shelley Fabares) in the television series Coach.

Fabray had significant hearing impairment and was a longtime advocate for the rights of the deaf and hearing-impaired people.

Her honors included the President's Distinguished Service Award and the Eleanor Roosevelt Humanitarian Award.

In 2004, Fabray was interviewed for the oral-history project of the Archives of American Television.