Mitzi Gaynor, best known for hit movie musical “South Pacific,” has died at the age of 93, her representatives said Thursday.
An actress, singer and dancer, Gaynor played the lead female role in the 1958 big-screen adaptation of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s Broadway sensation.
Her performance as Nellie Forbush, a naive US Navy nurse who falls in love with a French expat plantation owner on a remote Pacific island during the Second World War, earned Gaynor a Golden Globe nomination.
Gaynor “passed away peacefully of natural causes” in Los Angeles on Thursday, her managers Rene Reyes and Shane Rosamonda said in an email to AFP.
The movie’s soundtrack, which featured Gaynor’s vocals on songs like “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair” and “I’m in Love with a Wonderful Guy,” spent 31 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart.
Soon after “South Pacific,” Gaynor retired from film, as grand musicals fell out of fashion in Hollywood.
Gaynor went on to enjoy considerable success performing in Las Vegas shows and in Emmy Award-winning television variety specials.
But she is remembered for her 1950s movie musicals, which also included “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” “Anything Goes,” and “Les Girls.”
Gaynor was born Francesca Mitzi Marlene de Czanyi von Gerber in Chicago in September 1931, the only child of a Hungarian musical director and a vaudeville dancer.
Her husband of 52 years, Jack Bean, died in 2006.
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