Oldest working actress ‘never wanted to be a star’
CONNIE SAW Y E R 1912 - 2018 140 credits in TV, stage and screen
Connie Sawyer, who began performing in vaudeville and nightclubs more than eight decades ago and continued to appear on stages and screens until she became known as the oldest working actress in Hollywood, died Jan. 21 in Los Angeles. She was 105.
Her death, at the Motion Picture & Television Fund’s retirement home in Los Angeles, where she had lived for a decade, was confirmed by her daughter Lisa Dudley.
Miss Sawyer, as she liked to be known, was billed as the oldest member of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG- AFTRA) who was still working.
Her memoir, self- published last year, was titled, I Never Wanted to Be a Star — And I Wasn’t.
Still, since her Broadway debut in 1948, she accumulated about 140 acting credits in theatrical, movie and television productions.
She appeared on dozens of television shows, including Dynasty, Hawaii Five- O, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Murder, She Wrote, Seinfeld and Will & Grace. More recently, she played the mother of a Boston thug in hiding in the Showtime dramatic series Ray Donovan.
“I loved working on Donovan — my son was a hit man, and I really got to cuss,” she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2015.
Typically cast as wry and gossipy, Sawyer appeared in three dozen films, ranging from the John Wayne western True Grit ( 1969), as a long- winded witness to a hanging, to the comedy Dumb & Dumber ( 1994), as a scooter- riding pickpocket who steals Jim Carrey’s wallet.
The daughter of Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Romania, the Colorado- born Sawyer was nudged by her mother toward a show business career.
She won a talent contest award when she was eight, moved to New York a decade later and was nurtured by vaudeville star Sophie Tucker after Sawyer flopped at Grossinger’s hotel in the Catskills and fled the stage.
She subsequently prospered as a touring standup comic in vaudeville houses and nightclubs.
Sawyer debuted on Broadway in 1948 in Hilarities, a short- lived and largely panned variety revue starring Morey Amsterdam.
Her break came in 1957, when her improvised performance as a tipsy society lady in A Hole in the Head, a Broadway comedy about a hapless hotelier in Miami Beach, captivated an agent for Frank Sinatra. Sinatra bought the film rights and ordered his agent to “hire the drunk” for a 1959 adaptation directed by Frank Capra.
Sawyer reprised the role in the movie, her screen debut, appearing alongside Sinatra, Edward G. Robinson, Eleanor Parker and Thelma Ritter. She was the only credited member of the original Broadway cast to appear in the film.
“I never really wanted to be a star,” Sawyer declared in 2012. “It’s a business with me. I like to keep workin’. Just keep me workin’ — and let me get the residuals.”
She was born Rosie Cohen on Nov. 17, 1912, in Pueblo, Colo., to Samuel Cohen and the former Dora Inger. Although her parents had come from the same Romanian village, her mother arrived in the U. S. first. Her father immigrated to Colorado after Dora’s brothers agreed to pay his passage if he would marry one of their sisters.
When Rosie was seven, the family moved to Oakl and, where her f ather opened an army- navy store. Rosie took dance lessons as a child.
“My mother loved showbiz,” Sawyer told The Jewish Journal in 2012. “She would enter me into those amateur contests like they have today — what do they call them? Idol? They think it’s new. It’s not new.”
After she graduated from high school, a first-place finish in a talent show led to an appearance on the Al Pearce and His Gang radio program in San Francisco. ( A talent scout in New York encouraged her to take a name that sounded less Jewish.)
In addition to her daughter Lisa, Sawyer is survived by another daughter, Julie Watkins; four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.