Janet Blair

Martha Jane Lafferty (Janet Blair), actress: born Altoona, Pennsylvania 23 April 1921; married 1943 Lou Busch (marriage dissolved), 1952 Nick Mayo (one son, one daughter; marriage dissolved 1972); died Santa Monica, California 19 February 2007.

A vivacious "strawberry blonde", Janet Blair was an accomplished actress and singer who starred in several Columbia movies of the Forties, including Something to Shout About and Tonight and Every Night. In the former she introduced the Cole Porter standard "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To", but her studio always considered her second in importance to their superstar Rita Hayworth, and Blair eventually turned to the stage and television for career fulfilmemt.

She spent nearly three years touring in South Pacific, achieving a record of playing the role of Nellie Forbush more often than any other actress, and she starred on the London stage in the musical Bells are Ringing.

Born Martha Jane Lafferty in Altoona, Pennsylvania, in 1921, she attended public schools and sang in the church choir. She was 18 when a family friend arranged for her to audition for the bandleader Hal Kemp, and she was Kemp's vocalist for nearly two years until, while appearing at the Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles, she was spotted by a talent scout for Columbia Pictures just a few weeks before Kemp was killed in a car accident.

With the band dispersing after his death, Blair (who had taken her professional name from the county of Blair, Pennsylvania) accepted Columbia's contract offer and made her screen début in Three Girls About Town (1941), a lively comedy in which three sisters (Joan Blondell, Binnie Barnes and Blair) get involved in a murder mystery.

After a role in Blondie Goes to College (1942), Blair sang for the first time on screen when she introduced Saul Chaplin and Sammy Cahn's "Trinidad" in Two Yanks in Trinidad (1942) - Brian Donlevy and Pat O'Brien were the Yanks - and then had her first important film role, in a transcription of the stage hit My Sister Eileen (1942). Recounting the farcical misadventures of two small-town sisters who seek fame in New York, it starred Rosalind Russell as Ruth, an aspiring writer, with Blair as her prettier sister. Russell later recalled,

Janet Blair was still new to pictures. Right off, in her insecurity I guess, she began to upstage me. I took her aside and said, "Listen honey, Eileen is a sweet but rather selfish little girl, and if the audience catches you pulling stunts like that they're going to hate you. Besides, if it's going to be a contest, I've got several more years of experience and can take you." I taught her some legitimate tricks of the trade and she behaved herself after that. We became friends, and for years she told this story in interviews until finally I said, "Please, Janet, let's get another story, for God's sake."

The role made Blair a star, and Universal borrowed her to play opposite George Raft in Broadway (1943), a Twenties-set backstage drama that mixed gangsters with song-and-dance.

Something to Shout About (1943) was a more mundane backstage tale, but had the distinction of a Cole Porter score. Blair and Don Ameche introduced "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To", a beguilingly wistful song particularly resonant for the era of wartime partings. A huge hit, it went to the top of the Hit Parade and won an Oscar nomination.

Blair was leading lady to Cary Grant in the whimsical Once Upon a Time (1944), about a dancing caterpillar, and she later commented on the moods of her leading man:

Grant was charming to me at first, but he had fought Harry Cohn over my being cast because I was so much younger, and he insisted that a kissing scene be cut out. Sometimes he wouldn't communicate with me at all, just stare into space. Other times he was skittish, jolly, happy and cute. At the end he gave bottles of brandy to all the cast and crew, and I wasn't included. He didn't even shake my hand or say goodbye. I thought of barging into his dressing-room to talk to him, but finally I just slipped away. It was painful.

Blair then had one of her most fondly recalled roles, as an ill-fated singer in Tonight and Every Night (1945), a lavish musical based on Lesley Storm's play Heart of the City, itself inspired by the Windmill Theatre in London, which stayed open throughout the Blitz. Though Blair introduced another Oscar-nominated song, Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn's "Anywhere", the film's star was the studio's biggest attraction, Rita Hayworth. Blair, throughout her tenure at the studio, had been used as a "threat" to keep Hayworth in line, and she was aware of this.

Though she was kept busy - she was the wife of an aviation pioneer (Glenn Ford) in Gallant Journey (1946), sang several standards in The Fabulous Dorseys (1946), duetted with Alfred Drake in the mediocre musical Tars and Spars (1946), starred with Franchot Tone in the noir-ish mystery tale, I Love Trouble (1947), played a maiden in distress in the swashbuckler The Black Arrow (1948) and was an engaging foil to Red Skelton in the hit comedy, The Fuller Brush Man (1948) - she was happy when her contract expired. "I was always getting parts," she said, "where I'd be the girl who says, 'Oh, Red!' in a Skelton movie."

A new career on stage and television started when she was cast in the touring version of South Pacific, playing the role of Nellie Forbush created by Mary Martin. She played the role more than 1,200 times, more than any other actress, stating, "And I never missed a performance!"

Prolific on television, she starred in adaptations of the Broadway musicals A Connecticut Yankee and One Touch of Venus (both 1955), and in 1956 she replaced Nanette Fabray in the comedy television series Caesar's Hour, but she left after one season, commenting that she was "not given the opportunities I had been led to believe I would get".

In 1957 she starred at the Coliseum in London in the Broadway musical Bells are Ringing, but, though her charm and vivacity were ever present, the show had been created specifically for the unique lunacy of Judy Holliday and some of the material (such as the song "Is It a Crime?") sat uneasily on Blair's shoulders.

Her television career continued with guest roles in such shows as Marcus Welby, MD and Burke's Law, and she co-starred with Henry Fonda in The Smith Family (1971-72). She also pursued a successful career as a night-club torch singer, toured in such musicals as Mame and Irene, and starred as Sally in a Los Angeles production of Follies. "I just love performing," she once said. "If I weren't working, I'd be performing free for friends."

In 1957 she returned to the screen, ironically in a Red Skelton comedy, Public Pigeon No. 1, and the most notable of her sporadic later screen roles was that of a professor's wife who practices voodoo in the British horror tale Night of the Eagle (1962, US title Burn, Witch, Burn).

Tom Vallance