ANNE JEFFREYS

(26 January 1923 - 27 September 2017)

The American actress and singer Anne Jeffreys, who has died aged 94, began her career as a model while also training to be an opera singer, making her debut in La Bohème (1940). A live Hollywood revue led to her being cast in I Married an Angel, a musical film with Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald. A contract at the Republic Studios saw her in several B-westerns and she was in a couple of Dick Tracy thrillers. She co-starred with Sinatra in Step Lively, with Mitchum in Nevada, with Lawrence Tierney in Dillinger, and with Pat O’Brien in Riff-Raff. Many minor films, musical and otherwise, followed, while Jeffreys also kept her hand and voice in by appearing in theatre shows such as Kurt Weill’s Street Scene, Puccini’s Tosca, Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate and Sigmund Romberg’s My Romance. Divorced from her first husband Joseph Serena, she married Robert Sterling and they toured their cabaret act but then along came television and the series Topper, in which she played Marion the ghost. She still occasionally played in stage musicals – such as Camelot and The King and I. Anne Jeffreys made a few more films, including Panic in the City, The Southern Double Cross, Clifford and Richard III with David Carradine. With husband Sterling (who died in 2006) she had three sons, Jeffrey, Robert and Tyler.

MICHAEL DARVELL