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Quick Facts
- NAME: Judy Holliday
- OCCUPATION: Film Actress, Theater Actress
- BIRTH DATE: June 21, 1921
- DEATH DATE: June 07, 1965
- EDUCATION: Julia Richman High School
- PLACE OF BIRTH: New York, New York
- PLACE OF DEATH: New York, New York
- Originally: Judith G. Tuvim
Best Known For
Actress Judy Holliday was know for playing dumb but good-natured characters. She won an Academy award for best actress in the film Born Yesterday.
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Play NowJudy Holliday. (2013). The Biography Channel website. Retrieved 08:43, May 21, 2013, from http://www.biography.com/people/judy-holliday-9542418.
Judy Holliday. [Internet]. 2013. The Biography Channel website. Available from: http://www.biography.com/people/judy-holliday-9542418 [Accessed 21 May 2013].
"Judy Holliday." 2013. The Biography Channel website. May 21 2013, 08:43 http://www.biography.com/people/judy-holliday-9542418.
"Judy Holliday," The Biography Channel website, 2013, http://www.biography.com/people/judy-holliday-9542418 [accessed May 21, 2013].
"Judy Holliday," The Biography Channel website, http://www.biography.com/people/judy-holliday-9542418 (accessed May 21, 2013).
Judy Holliday [Internet]. The Biography Channel website; 2013 [cited 2013 May 21] Available from: http://www.biography.com/people/judy-holliday-9542418.
Judy Holliday, http://www.biography.com/people/judy-holliday-9542418 (last visited May 21, 2013).
Judy Holliday. The Biography Channel website. 2013. Available at: http://www.biography.com/people/judy-holliday-9542418. Accessed May 21, 2013.
Synopsis
after which she starred in the film version. In 1956 she starred on Broadway in Bells Are Ringing. She died of cancer in 1965.
Early Life
Actress. Born Judith G. Tuvim on June 21, 1921, in New York City, the daughter of Abraham Tuvim, a journalist and fund raiser for Jewish and social organizations, and of Helen Gollomb, a piano teacher at the Henry Street Settlement. At the age of six, her parents separated. An unusually brilliant child with a 172 I.Q., Tuvim described herself as "one of those obnoxious children who read War and Peace, Schnitzler and Molière."
After graduating from the Julia Richman High School in New York City in 1938, she hoped to attend Yale Drama School but was too young for admission. She went to work in the summer of 1938 as a switchboard operator at Orson Welles's Mercury Theater. Later that year, Max Gordon, owner of a Greenwich Village nightclub, offered her a chance to demonstrate her talent as a scriptwriter and lyricist. Tuvim contacted a group of performers she had met while vacationing at an upstate resort who called themselves "Six and Company." Among them was an unknown pianist, Leonard Bernstein, and lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green. The group renamed themselves "The Revuers," and as Lee Israel comments, "with her immense, fawnlike eypes and her brown hair piled up, Judy's talent for comedy was quickly perceived." The Revuers subsequently appeared for thirty-two weeks on an NBC radio program. With Judy Tuvim's career burgeoning, she adopted a new name, Judy Holliday (tuvim is the Hebrew word for holiday). In 1943 The Revuers left for Hollywood, but to their disappointment the major studios were more interested in the girl with "the natural gift of comedy," than in the group.
Stage and Screen Star
Holliday finally accepted a seven-year contract with Twentieth Century-Fox in 1944 but insisted that The Revuers appear in her first film, Greenwich Village. It was a box office failure. Unhappy with the beginnings of her film career, Holliday did not enjoy her stay in Hollywood. After appearing in Winged Victory (1944) and Something for the Boys (1944), she was released from her contract and returned to New York. In March 1945, she starred on Broadway in Kiss Them for Me, playing the first of her many dumb but good-natured characters. Her performance won her the Clarence Derwent Award as the best supporting actress of the year. In early February 1946 Jean Arthur's misfortune came to be Holliday's biggest break. Three days before Garson Kanin's stage comedy Born Yesterday was scheduled to open in Philadelphia, Arthur was forced to leave the cast due to illness.
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