First ‘Unsinkable Molly Brown’ charmed Broadway, won Tonys
Tammy Grimes, the throaty actress and singer who conquered Broadway at age 26, winning a Tony Award for her performance in “The Unsinkable Molly Brown,” and who went on to a distinguished stage career, died Sunday in Englewood, N.J. She was 82.
The death was confirmed by Duncan MacArthur, her nephew.
Grimes was largely unknown in 1960 when she was cast as Molly, the rags-to-riches turn-of-thecentury socialite-philanthropist who survived the sinking of the Titanic.
Her second Tony was for a 1969 revival of Noel Coward’s “Private Lives.”
Coward was a major influence on Grimes’ career. In 1958, he saw her performing at the Manhattan nightclub Downstairs at the Upstairs and cast her as the lead in “Look After Lulu,” a new comedy he had adapted from a Feydeau farce. In 1964, she appeared in “High Spirits,” a musical version of Coward’s “Blithe Spirit”, playing the ghost of the leading man’s first wife. The cast included Beatrice Lillie as a medium trying to summon her and Edward Woodward as the husband. It was one of more than a dozen Broadway productions in which Grimes starred.
Her mop of blond-red hair, a pointed chin and a ski-slope nose that was often compared to Bob Hope’s gave her a distinctive look.
“I never looked like an ingénue,” Grimes acknowledged in a 1960 interview with the New York Times Magazine. But that didn’t matter to her, she said, because “I don’t want to be America’s Sweetheart; I’d rather be something they don’t quite understand.”
Tammy Lee Grimes was born in Lynn, Mass., on Jan. 30, 1934, the second of three children of Luther Nichols Grimes and the former Eola Willard Niles.
The stage was Grimes’ first home. The off-Broadway productions in which she starred included Marc Blitzstein’s “The Cradle Will Rock,” at City Center in 1960, and a 1979 production of “A Month in the Country” with her daughter, Amanda Plummer. Grimes also worked at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, performing at least once with her first husband, Christopher Plummer; in “Henry IV, Part I” (1958).
Grimes married Plummer in 1956, and they divorced in 1960.