Nanette Fabray, 97; actress won Tony, Emmy awards

Nanette Fabray, a Tony Award-winning Broadway actress and singer who later received three Emmy Awards in the 1950s as Sid Caesar's comic foil on television, died Feb. 22 at her home in Palos Verdes Estates, California. She was 97.

Her son, Jamie MacDougall, announced her death. The cause was not disclosed.

Fabray began her career a child performer in vaudeville and in Hollywood films in her teens, but she gained her greatest acclaim on the Broadway stage and in television.

Throughout the 1940s, she appeared in musicals including a starring role in "High Button Shoes" in 1947, a frothy romp in which Ms. Fabray charmed audiences with her sunny manner, nimble dancing and vibrant singing.

In 1948, she starred in "Love Life," with music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, and won a Tony Award for her performance.

She appeared in other Broadway musicals, including "Arms and the Girl" and "Make a Wish," and worked with such renowned songwriters as Harold Arlen, Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers.

Early in her career, she auditioned for a Rodgers musical by singing Porter's "Everything I Love." When Rodgers asked whether she knew anything else, Fabray sang "Everything I Love" as a jazz tune, as an operatic aria, as a blues song and as a waltz.

"Honey, that was not only a bad audition, it was probably the worst I've ever heard," Fabray later recalled the songwriter saying. "But you can have the part if you want it."

In 1953, she had a major film role in the Hollywood musical "The Band Wagon," alongside Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse and Oscar Levant. Ms. Fabray was featured in several memorable songs by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz, including "That's Entertainment," "Louisiana Hayride" and "The Triplets," a lively tour de force in which she, Astaire and Jack Buchanan portrayed quarrelsome infant triplets.

As one of the most acclaimed comic actresses and singers of the time, Fabray appeared on countless variety shows in the early 1950s, including Caesar's "Your Show of Shows." In 1954, she was tapped to join the comedy master on his new program, "Caesar's Hour."

"The minute Sid and I worked together, it was as if we had worked together all of our lives," Fabray said in 2004 interview with the Television Academy Foundation's Archive of American Television. "It was like a theatrical marriage. . . . I could almost read Sid's mind. It was magic."

The show was broadcast live, and for two years, Caesar and Fabray created comedy on the fly, often improvising as the cameras rolled. In one skit, they played a married couple having an argument, performed entirely in pantomime to match the opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.