Name Dorothy Green Occupation Actress | Years active 1953-1997 | |
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Spouse Sidney Miller (m. 1967–1984), Sidney Green (m. 1941–1964) Movies The Big Heat, Face of a Fugitive, It Happened at the Wo, Tammy and the Millionaire, No Time to Be Young Similar Sidney Miller, Myrna Fahey, Paul Wendkos, Barry Miller, Norman Taurog | ||
Dorothy Green r.i.p.(1970s Y&R theme with vocals Original soundtrack version)
Dorothy Green (January 12, 1920 - May 8, 2008) was an American stage, film, and television actress. Her career spanned more than four decades, with the great majority of her work being a supporting guest actress on many popular television series from the early 1950s through the 1970s.
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Early life
Born Dorothy Jeanette Hufford in Los Angeles, California, in 1920, Green had neither aspirations as a child nor plans as a young woman to be an actor. In 1941 she married a dentist, Dr. Sydney Green; they subsequently had three children; and by 1950 Dorothy seemed settled into an established family life, the traditional course for most wives and mothers at the time. One day, however, an incidental social contact at a local charity event changed the course of Green's life and destined her for a career in entertainment. In the coastal neighborhood of Pacific Palisades in western Los Angeles, while volunteering her time to model clothes in a fashion show to raise money for a charity, she impressed the wife of a local talent agent. The woman mentioned Green to her husband, who soon contacted her. The agent too was impressed with Green's beauty and poise, and he encouraged her to pursue acting. She initially hesitated to do so; but her husband encouraged her as well to give acting a try. She did; and after a few months of training with a drama coach, Dorothy began performing on stage for the Manhattan Playhouse, a theater group located near her home in Manhattan Beach. Her first role was that of "Irene" in the group's production of Light Up the Sky by Moss Hart.
Film & television career
After some additional performances in other productions by the Manhattan Playhouse, Dorothy Green got her first professional job on television, on a live broadcast of the Jack Benny Program, in April 1953. She was cast in the supporting role of an office secretary in a sketch with Benny and his guest star, the comedian Fred Allen. That same year Green obtained several other roles on television and in films, including a part in the film-noir thriller The Big Heat starring Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame. For the remainder of the 1950s and into the 1970s, Dorothy Green received many other acting opportunities in movies and on episodes in a wide variety of television series. Some examples of the latter are the Adventures of the Falcon, The Pepsi-Cola Playhouse, The Whistler, Mike Hammer, Studio 57, Casey Jones, The Real McCoys, Sugarfoot, Panic!, Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color, Gunsmoke, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, 77 Sunset Strip, Thriller, Perry Mason, Wagon Train, Rawhide, Hawaiian Eye, Bonanza, My Three Sons, Kraft Mystery Theater, The Munsters, Tammy, The Virginian, Daniel Boone, The Outsider, Ironside, Mannix, Hawaii Five-O, Adam-12, and Emergency!
During the years when Dorothy Green was busy acting on television, she also continued to perform in films. Those films include Bad for Each Other (1953), Them! (1954, uncredited), Finger Man (1955), Trial (1955, uncredited), No Time to Be Young (1957), The Helen Morgan Story (1957), The Restless Years (1958), Face of a Fugitive (1959), Man-Trap (1961), It Happened at the World's Fair (1963), Critic's Choice (1963), Palm Springs Weekend (1963), Zebra in the Kitchen (1965), Tammy and the Millionaire (1967), Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came (1970), and in Help Me . . . I'm Possessed (1976).
Green continued to appear on some weekly television series during the 1970s, although most of her work in that period was in the long-running soap opera The Young & the Restless. For four years, beginning in 1973, she played the character "Jennifer," the matriarch of the Brooks family in the daily series.. After her work on The Young and the Restless, Green appeared on just four sitcoms between 1977 and 1981: The Love Boat; Fish; Hello, Larry; and Benson. Her final credited appearance on television was sixteen years later, in 1997, in the role of "Anna Lundt," on the Canadian-produced television series Exhibit A: Secrets of Forensic Science.
Personal life & death
Dorothy Green was married three times. Her first husband and the father of her three children was Dr. Sydney Green, whom she married in 1941. Dr. Green died in 1964, and three years later Dorothy married director Sydney Miller after working with him on the film Tammy and the Millionaire. Following her divorce from Miller in 1984, she married Dr. Arthur Heller, a dentist like her first husband. She and Heller remained together until his death from Alzheimer's disease in 2003.
On May 8, 2008, Dorothy Green died of natural causes after suffering a heart attack at her home in Los Angeles. She was 88 years old.