Julia Meade (1925 - 2016)

Julia Meade Dies at 90; Actress Found Leading Role as TV Pitchwoman May 18, 2016 Ms. Meade became a household name to Americans as a pitchwoman — as the elegant public face of Lincoln beginning in 1953 and as the promoter of a range of other products, including gas-powered appliances, Hudnut hair products, Life magazine and Kodak cameras. “Lincoln made her a celebrity, if not a star, the object of intense viewer interest,” Karal Ann Marling wrote in 1994 in her book “As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s.” Ms. Meade died on Monday while watching television at her home in Manhattan, her daughter Caroline Rudd said. She was 90. Ms. Meade became a television fixture as Ed Sullivan’s “favorite salesgirl,” as TV Guide described her, on his CBS show (later called simply “The Ed Sullivan Show”) for nearly a decade. “The seductive member of Sullivan’s TV family was its fetching Lincoln saleswoman, Julia Meade — part auto dealer, part chic sexpot,” Gerald Nachman wrote in 2009 in “Right Here on Our Stage Tonight!: Ed Sullivan’s America.” Ms. Meade was not the first First Lady of Television — Faye Emerson, Arlene Francis and Lucille Ball were among the others who staked claims to that title. But she was certainly present not long after it dawned, beginning on a DuMont network station in New York in 1948. By the late 1950s, after her commercial debut on NBC’s “Embassy Club,” she had dethroned Betty Furness as TV’s leading pitchwoman. Off camera, Ms. Meade drove a flashy flamingo-pink Lincoln Premier convertible. But she attributed her success on television to “well-groomed invisibility,” aided by evening gowns with modest necklines. Not only was she “the first example of a TV personality wholly identified with a single product,” as Ms. Marling wrote, but she also appeared as a mother concerned about nutrition in what was called the first “corrective commercial,” in 1971. That homey ad was broadcast after federal regulators accused the ITT Continental Baking Company of false advertising when it claimed that its Profile bread had fewer calories than other brands. “I’d like to clear up any misunderstandings you may have about Profile bread from its advertising or even its name,” Ms. Meade told her television audience. Each slice of Profile had seven fewer calories than that of rival brands, she explained, only because it was thinner than a typical slice. Still, dietetic or not, she said, “at our house, delicious taste makes Profile a family affair.” Ms. Meade’s film career included parts in the Rock Hudson-Doris Day romantic comedy “Pillow Talk” (1959), the Sandra Dee comedy “Tammy Tell Me True” (1961) and the Harrison Ford drama “Presumed Innocent” (1990). On Broadway, she was in Max Shulman and Robert Paul Smith’s “The Tender Trap” in 1954 (John Chapman of The Daily News called her the best new actress of the year), Sidney Sheldon’s “Roman Candle” in 1960, Jean Kerr’s “Mary, Mary” in 1962 and a revival of the Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur comedy “The Front Page” in 1969. She also starred in summer stock and appeared on television soap operas and game shows and as the hostess of “Playhouse 90.” Julia Meade Kunz was born on Dec. 17, 1925, in Boston, where her mother, Caroline Kunz (formerly Meade), a Shakespearean actress, was working at the time. Her father, Adam Kunz, was a typewriter salesman. The family lived in New York and moved to Ridgewood, N.J., when Julia was 10. After she graduated from the Yale School of Drama, Ms. Meade won her first professional role; in 1947 she played Virginia Dare’s mother in a perennial production of “The Lost Colony” in North Carolina. She went to New York in 1948 and worked as a model for the Harry Conover agency. She married Oliver Worsham Rudd Jr., a commercial illustrator. Besides her daughter Caroline, Ms. Meade is survived by another daughter, Alice Rudd Elder; two sisters, Betsy Redfield and Nancy Goodnow; and two grandchildren. Interviewed by Life magazine in 1960, Ms. Meade said that while she aspired to be a full-time actress, rather than being known primarily as a pitchwoman, “I tackle commercials as though I were playing the queen in ‘Hamlet.’” She added: “Fans don’t tear my clothes off or try to take a lock of my hair home to Junior. They stop me in the street mostly just to say hello — and that testifies that I can do something well. That’s all I ever wanted.”