Rose Marie

This article is about the actress. For other uses, see Rose Marie (disambiguation).

Rose Marie
Rose Marie on May 6, 2010
Born	Rose Marie Mazetta August 15, 1923 (1923-08-15) New York City, New York, U.S.
Occupation	Actress, singer
Years active	1926–present

Rose Marie (born August 15, 1923) is an American actress. As a child performer she had a successful singing career as Baby Rose Marie.

A veteran of vaudeville, Rose Marie's career includes film, records, theater, night clubs, and television. Her most famous role was television comedy writer Sally Rogers on the CBS situation comedy The Dick Van Dyke Show. She later portrayed Myrna Gibbons on CBS's The Doris Day Show and was also a frequent panelist on the game show Hollywood Squares.

Early years

Rose Marie Mazetta was born in New York City, New York, to Italian-American Frank Mazzetta and Polish-American Stella Gluszcak. At the age of three, she started performing under the name "Baby Rose Marie." At five, Rose Marie became a radio star on NBC and made a series of films.

Rose Marie was a nightclub performer in her teenage years before becoming a radio comedian. She was billed then as "The Darling of the Airwaves." According to her autobiography, Hold the Roses, she was assisted in her career by many members of organized crime, including Al Capone and Bugsy Siegel. She performed at the opening night of the Flamingo Hotel which was built by Siegel.

At her height of fame as a child singer (late 1929–1934), she had her own radio show, made numerous records, and was featured in a number of Paramount films and shorts. In 1929, the five- or six-year-old singer made a Vitaphone sound short titled "Baby Rose Marie the Child Wonder," (now restored and available in the Warner Brothers DVD set of The Jazz Singer). For her first recording session, in 1932, she was accompanied by Fletcher Henderson's Orchestra. She continued to appear in films through the mid-1930s, making shorts and a feature, International House with W. C. Fields, for Paramount.

Television

In the 1960–1961 season, Rose Marie co-starred with Shirley Bonne, Elaine Stritch, Jack Weston, Raymond Bailey, and Stubby Kaye in the CBS sitcom My Sister Eileen. She played Bertha, a friend of the Sherwood sisters, Ruth, a magazine writer, played by Stritch, and Eileen, an aspiring actress, Bonne's role.

After starring for all five seasons of The Dick Van Dyke Show (in the role originally played by Sylvia Miles in the pilot episode), Rose Marie co-starred on CBS's The Doris Day Show as Doris Martin's friend and co-worker, Myrna Gibbons. She later had a semi-regular seat in the upper center square on the original version of Peter Marshall's Hollywood Squares, alongside her friend and longtime Van Dyke co-star, Morey Amsterdam. She also appeared on both 1986 and 1998 syndicated revival.

In the early 1990s, she had a recurring role as Frank Fontana's mother on the CBS sitcom Murphy Brown. She also played Roy Biggins's domineering mother, Eleanor "Bluto" Biggins in the TV series Wings.

Rose Marie and Morey Amsterdam guest-starred together in a February 1996 episode of the NBC sitcom Caroline in the City, shortly before Amsterdam's death in October of that same year. She appeared with the surviving Dick Van Dyke Show cast members in a 2004 reunion special. Rose Marie was especially close to actor Richard Deacon from that show, and offered him the suits left behind when her husband died in 1964, as the two men were of similar height and build. She was married to trumpeter Bobby Guy from 1946 until his death in 1964.

She also appeared in two episodes of the NBC series The Monkees in the mid 1960s.

Theater

From 1977–81, she co-starred with Rosemary Clooney, Helen O'Connell and Margaret Whiting in the musical revue 4 Girls 4, which toured the U.S. and appeared on television several times. As of 2011, she continues to occasionally perform.

Filmography

Features

• International House (1933)
• Top Banana (1954)
• The Big Beat (1958)
• Don't Worry, We'll Think of a Title (1966)
• Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round (1966)
• Memory of Us (1974)
• The Man from Clover Grove (1975)
• Bruce's Deadly Fingers (1976)
• Cheaper to Keep Her (1980)
• Lunch Wagon (1981)
• Witchboard (1986)
• Sandman (1993)
• Psycho (1998)
• Lost & Found (1999)
• Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the Thirteenth (2000)
• Surge of Power: The Stuff of Heroes (2004)

Short subjects

• Baby Rose Marie the Child Wonder (1929)
• Rambling 'Round Radio Row #4 (1932)
• Back in '23 (1933)
• Sing, Babies, Sing (1933)
• Rambling 'Round Radio Row (1934)
• At the Mike (1934)
• Surprising Suzie (1953)

Television work

• The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1960)
• The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961–1966)
• The Hollywood Squares (1966–1981) (regular panelist)
• Walter of the Jungle (1967) (unsold pilot)
• The Virginian (1967)
• The Doris Day Show (cast member from 1969–1971)
• S.W.A.T. (1975) (multiple cameos as Hilda, the sandwich delivery lady)
• Bridge Across Time (1985)
• Remington Steele (1986) (Series 4 Episode 17 - Steele in the Spotlight)
• The Jackie Bison Show (1990) (unsold pilot) (voice)
• Scorch (1992) (canceled after 3 episodes)
• Hardball (1994) (canceled after 7 episodes)
• Cagney & Lacey: Together Again (1995)
• Wings (1997)
• Suddenly Susan (1997)
• The Hughleys (2001)
• Tracey Ullman in the Trailer Tales (2003)
• The Alan Brady Show (2003) (voice)
• The Dick Van Dyke Show Revisited (2004)

External links

• An interview with Rose Marie, March 2011
• Rose Marie at the Internet Movie Database
• Rose Marie Interview with Archive of American Television