Nita Bieber
Dancer and actress who co-starred with the Three Stooges and worked with Sinatra and Garland
NITA BIEBER, who has died aged 92, was a dancer and actress who was described by Bob Hope as “a knock-out”. Best remembered for the Three Stooges comedy Rhythm and Weep (1946), Bieber was featured on the cover of Life magazine in 1949 with an article predicting that she was going to be the next big sensation.
Illness later prevented her from hitting the big time and this, coupled with the meagre roles she was given, meant that she was never given the opportunity to shine.
She was born in Los Angeles on July 18 1926. Her father was a concert pianist and opera singer, while her mother, Callie, was a dancer. Nita and two of her four siblings followed them into show business. Nita was five when she took to the stage with a fan dance. She wanted to sing more than anything else, but was told by her mother that she had no voice.
After Hollywood High School, Nita travelled as a dancer with a United Service Organizations troupe performing in hospital wards before joining Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Jerry Colonna and James Cagney as part of the Hollywood Victory Committee with morale-boosting tours across the US.
In 1946, Columbia signed Nita Bieber, and she took a small role in the musical romance Talk About a Lady, before playing Hilda in Rhythm and Weep, in which the Stooges are hell-bent on ending their lives
because they can’t find jobs, only to discover, on top of the office block from which they want to jump, three girls (including Bieber) with the same idea. Before they can end it all, a Broadway showman appears.
Bieber followed this with The Jolson Story, the action adventure The Lone Wolf in Mexico, and the crime drama Millie’s Daughter. She joined her friend Jean Porter in Little Miss Broadway and played a spunky waitress in the comedy Kilroy Was Here before she was released from her contract and headed to Monogram, where she played Mame in the Bowery Boys film News Hounds.
In 1949, she made the cover of Life, which helped her secure a lucrative contract with MGM. There was much hype surrounding her big dance number in Nancy Goes to Rio (1950), about a mother and daughter competing for the same role and, unwittingly, the same man. But the number, and most of Nita’s scenes, wound up on the cutting room floor, reportedly because one of the film’s stars, Carmen Miranda, did not like the competition.
Nita Bieber stayed at MGM long enough, however, to give a scene-stealing performance as a seductive Cuban dancer in a smoky Mambo night club in the film noir, A Lady Without a Passport, starring Hedy Lamarr. She played a young student in Summer Stock (released as If You Feel Like Singing in Britain) starring Judy Garland and Gene Kelly, before being loaned out to Universal-international for the swashbuckler The Prince Who Was a Thief, starring Tony Curtis in his first leading role.
In 1951 she contracted polio and was warned by doctors that she may never work again, but credited her Christian Scientist mother for her recovery. Within a year she was dancing again, but in her absence had lost her traction in Hollywood.
Unable to find screen work, she joined the Jack Cole Dancers for a nine-month tour of America and Canada. The Dancers provided talent for films like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and No Business Like Show Business.
In 1953, she formed the Nita Bieber Dancers, who quickly rose to prominence, performing at the Coconut Grove, as well as the Las Vegas nightspots the El Rancho and the Frontier (alongside Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis, Jr) and supporting the likes of Benny Goodman, the Marx Brothers and Josephine Baker.
They also performed on television, and were the feature performers on Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin’s show The Colgate Comedy Hour, as well as The Milton Berle Show and The Jack Paar Program.
Her last screen role of note was in Kismet (1955) with Howard Keel and Judy Garland. That year she met a dentist, Jack Wall, and they were married in less than six months, after which she retired from show business. “I loved him more than the career,” she recalled in 2014.
Bieber maintain a healthy regime well into her nineties. “I work out daily and enjoy life,” she said. “I had a happy ending.” Commenting on the fan mail that continued to trickle in, she added, “and for those teenage girls out there, and boys, may I say for the record that I’m not Justin Bieber’s grandmother!”
Jack Wall died in 1997, and Nita Bieber is survived by their children.