Benay Venuta

Benay Venuta (born Benvenuta Rose Crooke;

Venuta's summer stock and regional theatre credits included A Little Night Music, Bus Stop, Gypsy, Come Blow Your Horn, Auntie Mame, The Prisoner of Second Avenue, Little Me, and Pal Joey.

Television In 1958, Venuta was cast as private eye Bertha Cool in a television pilot for a series to be called Cool and Lam, based on the novels by Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A. A. Fair, but the pilot remains the only episode in existence.

Television audiences knew her as Jean Smart's prim and proper mother-in-law Ellen Stillfield in the sitcom Designing Women.

She also appeared on That Girl in a 1968 episode titled, "The Seventh Time Around," as Lady Margaret "Trixie" Weatherby.

Radio Venuta's Benay Venuta Hour "was a popular CBS radio program." She was a vocalist on such shows as Freddie Rich's Penthouse Party, Duffy's Tavern and Take a Note. In 1948, she was the host of Keep Up with the Kids, a Mutual radio quiz show in which celebrity parents (Roddy McDowall, Penny Singleton, Pat O'Brien) competed against their children.

Personal life Venuta married Kenneth Kelley on October 20, 1935, in Ossining, New York. They were divorced on November 29, 1939. She next married film producer Armand Deutsch; the couple had two daughters, Patty and Deborah. They separated in June 1950, and she sued for divorce two weeks later. She was married to character actor Fred Clark from 1952 to 1962.

Death Venuta died from lung cancer in New York City on September 1, 1995, at age 85. However, both the California Birth Index and the United States Census show her birth at 1910, which would make her 85 in 1995, at the time of her death.