Penny Singleton, best remembered as Blondie, the scatterbrained yet often sensible character she played in 28 movies from 1938 to 1950, died Wednesday at Sherman Oaks Hospital. She was 95. Singleton was known to later generations as the voice of Jane Jetson in the cartoon movies and TV shows about the futuristic family. But she was most identified with her role as the wife of bumbling Dagwood Bumstead in the movies based on the popular comic strip created by Chic Young. Besides her movie role as Blondie, Singleton played the character on a popular radio program from 1939 to 1950. But by the time Blondie came to television for the first time in 1957, Singleton was almost 50, and the role went to the younger Pamela Britton.
Born Dorothy McNulty on Sept. 15, 1908, in Philadelphia, Singleton was the daughter of a newspaper typesetter. She began her career at the age of 7 singing songs at movie houses. She also performed in vaudeville as a child.
“I suppose it would be difficult for many people today to understand, but vaudeville was the most marvelous school for a child imaginable,” she told the Cincinnati Post in 1997. By the time she was a teenager, she was getting chorus girl and other small roles on Broadway, including doing a number with Jack Benny in a revue called “The Great Temptations.” By 1928, she had joined a road company of “Good News,” starring opposite Jack Haley. Back on Broadway, she sang two numbers with Haley — “Button Up Your Overcoat” and “I Could Give Up Anything but You” — in “Follow Thru.” While in her 20s, she moved to Hollywood, appeared in a series of minor roles in better movies — or sometimes better roles in minor movies — and changed her name to Penny Singleton. Singleton had a role in the 1930 film version of “Good News” and in “After the Thin Man” (1936), one of the Nick and Nora Charles movies starring William Powell and Myrna Loy. In the latter, Singleton, playing saucy nightclub singer Polly Byrnes, delivers this line: “Hey, don’t call me illiterate — my parents were married right here at City Hall!”
After “Blondie,” Singleton became active in labor unions, particularly the American Guild of Variety Artists, to which she was elected president in 1969.
In 1966, she was a leader in the strike to get better working conditions for Radio City Music Hall’s Rockettes. At the age of 88, Singleton said of her career, “I loved everything I did, big or small, it didn’t matter as long as it was fun and was pleasing to people.”
Never married, eh? Trade Unionist, huh ? Actress, hmmm ? This one’ll take some secrets with her . . .
I’m torn, now; would I prefer to turn my toes up at the “Motion Picture and Television Fund retirement home in Woodland Hills” or “Sherman Oaks Hospital”? Sherman Oaks sounds such a nice, solid kind of place to die, yet even from here I can here the birds chirping, the lawn mower purring and the sprinklers hissing at the Motion Picture and Television Fund retirement home in Woodland Hills. Very tricky . . . however, this weeks award winner is here . . . ‘Watch Us Grow - See Our Future!’ Congratulations dying people !
I had a crush on her as a tween. For a few formulative years they used to show the Blondie Movies Sundays at 10 on an independant station before there were (real) videogames, internet or 500 channels.
I think she had a special quality – she really was great in the Blondie role: Strong, Sexy, womanly and not insipid. Quick name other roles that show late40’searly50’s housewife’s on film like that: It will be a short list
I watched all the “Blondie” movies multiple times and love them. However, it was hard to see Baby Dumpling and Cookie grow up - they just seemed more fun as little kids.
Penny had the gift of being able to characterize Blondie as both a complete Ditz and a Wily Woman. She could be just as obtuse as Dagwood and turn around with a brilliant scheme to save the day. And it’s a tribute to her that you believed the character both ways!
I have a paperback novel with the picture of the “TV Family”. It’s a collection on Blondie comic strips. It’s been years, but I think it has strips about the first characterization of Blondie and Dagwood. She was a rich-husband-seeker golddigger and he a wealthy playboy. Hard to imagine that. Apparently the series was revamped to have Dagwood give up his fortune for Blondie and Blondie fell really in love with Dagwood. Whether or not that story is really in there, I do know the book has some strips where the Bumsteads meet the Addams family. Weird enough as well.
I actually saw “Dorothy McNulty” in ther 1929 film version of Good News—a dreadful film, but she did the most athletic, red-hot version of “The Varsity Drag” I have ever seen.
IIRC, in the original comic strip Blondie was Julius Caesar Dithers’ daughter and she was the one who had to give up all the money, not Dagwood. I may be wrong on that, though.
And indeed you are. Blondie Boopadoop was a cheap little cabaret singer when she and the wealthy Dagwood married. Then the Depression hit and they became suburban types.
Yep, re-read the OP: “Singleton was known to later generations as the voice of Jane Jetson in the cartoon movies and TV shows about the futuristic family.”