Anne Jeffreys
Versatile actress who ranged from Kiss Me, Kate to Baywatch
ANNE JEFFREYS, who has died aged 94, was an elegant Hollywood actress turned television stalwart who never quite attained the fame achieved by her contemporaries Lucille Ball and Gale Storm.
Arguably, this was because Anne Jeffreys never concentrated on any one given area. She performed in operettas and in musicals such as the original Broadway production of Kiss Me Kate, she rode the range several times with the cowboy stars Bill Elliott and Gabby Hayes, was in B-movie serials such as Dick Tracy and latterly found fame as David Hasselhoff ’s mother in Baywatch.
“My career was nothing if not extremely diverse,” she said in 2016.
She was born Anne Jeffreys Carmichael in Goldsboro, North Carolina, on January 26 1923. Unable to go to school due to ill health, she was pushed into acting by her widowed mother, a frustrated actress and singer.
By her 10th birthday Anne had her own radio show. “I wasn’t keen on the attention,” she recalled, “but got used to it – mother loved it.” She then moved with her mother to New York to pursue her singing career. In between her studies, she worked as a junior model.
In 1941 she took a supporting role in Hollywood in the musical revue Fun for the Money. This lead to bit parts with MGM before she secured a contract with Republic Pictures, appearing in, among other films, Moonlight Masquerade with Dennis O’keefe (1942).
Republic then loaned her to RKO to co-star with Frank Sinatra in Step Lively (1944), after which, despite her musical numbers with Sinatra, she found herself in the saddle opposite newcomer Robert Mitchum and Guinn “Big Boy” Williams in Nevada (1944).
Her most memorable film was Max Nosseck’s crime thriller Dillinger (1945), in which she played the “Lady in Red” who turns against the eponymous mobster (Lawrence Tierney). Next came Dick Tracy (1945), in which she played the hero’s girlfriend Tess Trueheart, and, a year later, the sequel, Dick Tracy vs Cueball.
Anne Jeffreys also sang in operas, including La bohème with the New York City Opera Company and Tosca with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
In 1947 Kurt Weill, having heard her in Tosca, offered her the lead in his Broadway opera Street Scene. She remained with the show for six months before returning to RKO in another western, Return of the Bad Men (1948).
She then left Hollywood for the stage, appearing for two years in Kiss Me, Kate. She did not return to the big screen again until the James Garner-kim Novak romantic comedy Boys Night Out (1962).
After her marriage, in 1951, to Robert Sterling, she and her husband had begun performing in a nightclub act, the success of which brought them a television partnership in the fantasy sitcom Topper.
Although he left showbusiness to become a computer expert, Sterling took time out in the mid-seventies to appear with his wife on television in an episode of Love, American Style.
Anne Jeffreys also made guest appearances on popular television shows such as Wagon Train, Dr Kildare and Fantasy Island.
In 1982 she was cast as Amanda Croft in the soap-opera Falcon Crest, opposite Jane Wyman as the matriarch of a family vineyard. In the next decade she appeared in LA Law and as Irene Buchannon, the mother of David Hasselhoff in Baywatch (1993-98).
In 2004 she joined the cast of General Hospital; she played the Duchess of York in a 2008 film of Richard III, and she appeared in the American version of the British comedian Jo Brand’s sitcom set in a geriatric ward, Getting On (2013).
“I hope I’ll always be as busy as a blind dog in a meat shop,” she once said. “I thrive on activity.”
A brief first marriage was annulled in 1945. Her second husband, Robert Sterling, died in 2013. She is survived by their three sons.
Anne Jeffreys, born January 26 1923, died September 27 2017