Emmy-winning actress and singer Polly Bergen had a 60-year career and died today of natural causes in her home in Southbury, Connecticut. She was 84. Bergen was a household name from the beginning of her career. She made albums and played leading roles in films, stage musicals and TV dramas. She also hosted her own variety series, was a popular game show panelist, and founded a beauty company, that made her millions. In more recent years, she played Felicity Huffman’s mother on Desperate Housewives and the past mistress of Tony Soprano’s late father on The Sopranos. She won an Emmy in 1958 portraying the singer Helen Morgan on Playhouse 90 and during the 1950s, she became a regular on To Tell the Truth.
Along with Robert Mitchum she in starred Cape Fear, with Gregory Peck. (It was remade in 1991 by Martin Scorsese.) In 1964′s Kisses for My President, Bergen was cast as the first female U.S. president, with Fred MacMurray as First Gentleman. (The President ends up quitting when she gets pregnant.) When Geena Davis played the first woman president in Commander in Chief, in 2005, Bergen was cast as her mother. She had a sort of a revival again, playing a prim rich lady in John Waters’ 1990 musical “Cry-Baby.”
She was refused an audition for the 2001 Broadway revival of Follies and contacted the show’s composer Stephen Sondheim. He gave her an audition and then the role of a faded star who sings of her show biz ups and downs. The show-stopping “I’m Still Here,” was a lot like Bergen’s own story, and she was nominated for a Tony award for the role.
“I was fanatically ambitious. All I ever wanted to be was a star. I didn’t want to be a singer. I didn’t want to be an actress. I wanted to be a star.”
And she was for a long time, God bless her.
With Robert Mitchum in Cape Fear
(via LA Times)
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