TAMMY GRIMES

(30 January 1934 - 30 October 2016)

Essentially a stage performer, the American actress and singer Tammy Grimes occasionally appeared in films. Her Broadway debut was as the understudy for Kim Stanley in Bus Stop (1955) and she continued to work in theatre and also in cabaret. Noël Coward saw her in a nightclub act singing in her distinctive throaty voice and put her into his play Look After Lulu, for which she won a Theatre World Award. Grimes’s biggest hit was the starring role in Meredith Willson’s Titanic musical The Unsinkable Molly Brown, for which she won a Tony Award in 1960. She won another Tony for playing Amanda in Coward’s Private Lives. Had she played Molly Brown in the film version (Debby Reynolds got the role), then Tammy Grimes’s career in movies might have been better. As it was she appeared in Three Bites of the Apple, her first film in 1967, followed by Arthur! Arthur!, Play It As It Lays, Somebody Killed Her Husband, and Stanley Kramer’s The Runner Stumbles. During the 1980s Grimes was in Can’t Stop the Music with the Village People, America (her only co-starring film role), Mr North, James Ivory’s Slaves of New York, and a few others including her last feature film, High Art, in 1998. Tammy Grimes was married three times: to Christopher Plummer (with whom she had a daughter, actress Amanda Plummer), then to the actor Jeremy Slate and finally to composer Richard Jameson (in 1971) until his death in 2005.

MICHAEL DARVELL