Edie Adams (born Edith Elizabeth Enke, April 16, 1927 – October 15, 2008) was an American comedienne, actress, singer and businesswoman. She was an Emmy Award and Tony Award winner.
Born Elizabeth Edith Enke in 1925 (some sources give 1927) in Kingston, Philadelphia, she initially hoped for a career in opera, and she trained as a classical singer at the Juillard School of Music before graduating from Columbia School of Drama. In 1950 she won a talent competition as Miss US Television, which led to an appearance (billed as Edith Adams) with Milton Berle on his television show.
The following year she was invited to audition as resident vocalist on a Philadelphia television series, Ernie in Kovacsland. Adams proved an admirable foil for Kovacs' innovative humour and eccentric characterisations, and she stayed with him when, re-titled The Ernie Kovacs Show, the series moved to CBS in 1952.In 1953 she made her Broadway début as Rosalind Russell's sister in the Leonard Bernstein-Betty Comden-Adolph Green musical hit Wonderful Town, based on the play My Sister Eileen. Adams' fresh blonde beauty was ideal for the role of baby-faced Eileen, who brings out the protective impulse in men, unlike her assured sister Ruth, played by Russell, and she had an appealing solo ballad, "A Little Bit in Love" as well as partnering Russell in the show-stopping "Ohio", in which the
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sisters express doubts about having left their small-town home for the excitement of New York.
sisters express doubts about having left their small-town home for the excitement of New York. In 1954 Adams and Kovacs eloped to Mexico City, and she returned to Broadway in 1956 to play the winsome Daisy Mae in the musical Li'l Abner, based on Al Capp's satirical comic strip about the citizens of Dogpatch. Adams shared with Peter Palmer (as Abner) the show's major ballad, "Namely You", and won a supporting actress Tony Award for her appealing performance.
In 1957, a year in which both she and Kovacs were nominated for Emmy awards for best performances in a comedy series, Adams
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played fairy godmother to Julie Andrews in Rodgers and Hammerstein's television musical Cinderella, which was reputedly watched by 107 million people.
Adams has described herself in fits of self-deprecation as a "singer who never had a record on the charts." While that may be, the evidence of her recordings show that Miss Adams had a most ingratiating way with a melody and had a keen ear for selecting out-of-the-way choices for great songs to interpret.
Adams had her first major film role when cast in Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960) as the spurned mistress of philandering boss Fred MacMurray. She then had a prime role in arguably the funniest of the comedies co-starring Doris Day and Rock Hudson, Lover Come Back (1961), as the chorus girl Rebel Davis, who stars in a series of commercials for Hudson's advertising executive.
In 1962, after Adams and Kovacs attended a party at Milton Berle's home, Kovacs left to drive home (Adams was to follow in their second car), but had a fatal crash when his vehicle skidded on the wet street – Adams suggested he was probably lighting one of his constant cigars when he lost control. (Their daughter Mia also died in a car crash, in 1982.) It transpired that Kovacs owed half a million dollars in back taxes, which Adams eventually settled by taking whatever work would pay most, refusing to file for bankruptcy and declining the offer of a benefit concert suggested by friends including Berle, Frank Sinatra, Jack Lemmon and Dean Martin.
She played the wife of Sid Caesar in the film It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), and made a strong impact as Steve McQueen's stripper girlfriend who refuses to lend him money so that his lover can have an abortion, in Love with the Proper Stranger (1963), and as the wife of an unscrupulous Presidential candidate (Cliff Robertson) in The Best Man (1964). She also appeared in Las Vegas, where Groucho Marx introduced her with the comment, "There are lots of things that Edie Adams won't do, but there's nothing she can't do".
Adams died in Los Angeles, California on October 15, 2008, at age 81, from cancer and pneumonia. She was interred in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Hollywood Hills alongside her first husband Ernie, between her daughter, Mia, and her stepdaughter, Kippie.
(Edited from Wikipedia but mainly from Independent article by Tom Vallance)