Buff Cobb

Buff Cobb (born Patrizia Cobb Chapman, October 19, 1927 – July 12, 2010) was an Italian-born American actress and, with then-husband Mike Wallace, host of one of television's first talk-shows.

Early life and career

Patrizia Cobb Chapman was born in Florence, Tuscany, Italy, to opera singer Frank Chapman, whose own father was the ornithologist and pioneering writer of field guides Frank Michler Chapman, and playwright Elisabeth Cobb, whose father was the author and humorist Irvin S. Cobb.

Her family moved first to New York City and then to Santa Monica, California, where Cobb graduated from high school. she married attorney Greg Bautzer, the first of her four husbands, divorcing him after six months. before going on with the divorce in 1948.

By that time the program had gone from radio to become the pioneering CBS television talk show Mike and Buff. Based in New York City, it ran from August 20, 1951, to February 27, 1953. Originally titled Two Sleepy People, the live show, in which the couple debated a different topic daily and then tried to reach consensus after interviewing experts, was broadcast experimentally on weekday mornings Initially a thrice-weekly late-afternoon show, and it moved to a Saturday 6-6:45 p.m. slot from November 10, 1951, to January 1952.

Later life Cobb and Wallace divorced in 1955. Cobb's fourth husband, H. Spencer Martin, died in 1987. produced Devine's Children of the Wind, which ran six performances and one preview from October 23–27, 1973, at the Belasco Theatre.

Cobb died in a nursing home in Lebanon, New Hampshire, at age 82.

Awards/nominations 1963 Tony Award nomination, Best Producer of a Play, with Paul Vroom and Burry Fredrik, for a revival of George Bernard Shaw's Too True to Be Good.