Hold the Mayo! Virginia dead at 84.

Eve · January 18, 2005, 2:59pm

First Thelma White, then Ruth Warrick, now:

Virginia Mayo, the beautiful blond who rose to movie stardom in the 1940s in comedies opposite Bob Hope and Danny Kaye and had memorable dramatic turns with James Cagney in “White Heat” and Dana Andrews in “The Best Years of Our Lives,” died Monday. She was 84. A former vaudevillian who came under the wing of producer Samuel Goldwyn, Mayo launched her movie career with a small part in the 1943 movie “Jack London,” starring her future husband, Michael O’Shea. She also received billing as a Goldwyn Girl in “Up in Arms,” a 1944 comedy starring Kaye and Dinah Shore. Over the next few years, she teamed up with Kaye in the “The Kid From Brooklyn,” “A Song Is Born” and, most notably, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.”

Goldwyn cast Mayo against her image as the dream girl next door in “The Best Years of Our Lives.” Mayo was widely praised for her first major dramatic role as the two-timing wife of Andrews, a returning war veteran, in the Oscar-winning 1946 film. Three years later, after moving to Warner Bros., Mayo gave one of her best-remembered performances, in “White Heat,” director Raoul Walsh’s crime melodrama in which Mayo played the unscrupulous wife of Cagney, a mentally disturbed gang boss who alternately cuddles and slaps her. During the 1940s and '50s, Mayo appeared in more than 40 films, including “The Girl From Jones Beach” with Ronald Reagan, “Captain Horatio Hornblower” with Gregory Peck, “The Silver Chalice” with Paul Newman, “The Flame and the Arrow” with Burt Lancaster, “Along the Great Divide” with Kirk Douglas and “Colorado Territory” with Joel McCrea.

After graduating from high school in 1937, Mayo broke into show business as a dancer with the St. Louis Municipal Opera Company. When a vaudeville act called “Pansy the Horse” came to town, the two comics who wore the horse costume asked Mayo to join them as the girl in the act. She worked as the duo’s beautifully attired foil for five years, touring the country and taking her stage name, Mayo, from one of the comics. In New York City in 1941, the act joined Eddie Cantor in his Broadway musical “Banjo Eyes.” Showman Billy Rose caught their act and put them into the revue at his Diamond Horseshoe nightclub. “It was exciting,” Mayo recalled in 1981. “I got my first chance on Broadway to really sing and dance.” After her movie career faded in the early 1960s, Mayo acted in stage and dinner theater productions and made only occasional appearances in movies and on television.

AncientHumanoid · January 18, 2005, 3:03pm

Someone once described her amazing beauty as proof of the existance of God.

Eve · January 18, 2005, 3:21pm

Then wouldn’t Marie Dressler be proof there is no God?

AncientHumanoid · January 18, 2005, 3:35pm

Marie Dressler - Not the freshest face, that’s for sure.
Virginia Mayo - for any who have forgotten.

Why, yes. JSR is one of my bookmarks.