Actress Rose Marie dies at 94
Rose-Marie Mazzetta had a professional career spanning nearly 90 years, probably one of the longest careers in the history of the entertainment industry. Beginning her career as "Baby Rose Marie" as a young child, she recorded several sound films in the late 1920s and early 1930s just as the technology was emerging into the mainstream. According to music historian Joel Whitburn, she was the last surviving entertainer to have a hit record from before World War ii.
By the late 1930s, she was out of show business, but she would return in the early 1950s, first in feature films, then in television, where she would make her most enduring impact. She had regular roles on the sitcoms
My Sister Eileen and
The Doris Day Show, but it was her role on
The Dick Van Dyke Show, that of spinster Sally Rogers, that gave Rose Marie her most lasting claim to fame. She then parlayed her mid-level celebrity into a regular position on the game show
Hollywood Squares well into the 1970s.
She continued to be an active entertainer until her death, including a regular role as Mitzi Balzer, the Marge Schott-inspired acid-tongued owner of a struggling baseball team in the 1994 sitcom
Hardball. A documentary covering her career,
Wait for Your Laugh, was released two months ago.
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