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Phyllis Newman 1933 - 2019

Phyllis Newman of New York, New York County, New York United States was born on March 19, 1933 in Jersey City, NJ. She was married to Adolph Green, and had children Amanda Green and Adam Green. Phyllis Newman died at age 86 years old on September 15, 2019 in New York, NY.
Phyllis Newman
Phyllis Newman
New York, New York County, New York United States
March 19, 1933
Jersey City, NJ
September 15, 2019
New York, New York, United States
Female
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Phyllis Newman's History: 1933 - 2019

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  • Introduction

    Phyllis Newman Born March 19, 1933 Jersey City, New Jersey, U.S. Died September 15, 2019 (aged 86) New York City, U.S. Occupation Actress, singer Years active 1952–2019 Spouse(s) Adolph Green (m. 1960; died 2002) Children Adam Green Amanda Green Phyllis Newman (March 19, 1933 – September 15, 2019) was an American actress and singer. She won the 1962 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for her role as Martha Vail in the Broadway-theatre production of Subways Are for Sleeping and was nominated twice for the Drama Desk Award. Early life and education Newman was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, the daughter of Rachael, a fortune teller, and Sigmund Newman, a handwriting analyst, both boardwalk workers. Her parents were Eastern European Jewish immigrants. She attended Lincoln High School where she was voted "Future Hollywood Star." Broadway Newman made her Broadway debut in Wish You Were Here in 1952. Additional theater credits include Bells Are Ringing, Pleasures and Palaces, The Apple Tree, On the Town, The Prisoner of Second Avenue, Awake and Sing!, Broadway Bound, and Subways Are for Sleeping, for which she won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical, beating out Barbra Streisand in I Can Get It for You Wholesale. She was nominated twice for the Drama Desk Award and received a second Tony Award nomination, for Broadway Bound. In June 1979 Newman and Arthur Laurents collaborated on the one-woman show The Madwoman of Central Park West. Produced by Fritz Holt, it featured songs by Leonard Bernstein, Jerry Bock, John Kander, Martin Charnin, Betty Comden, Adolph Green, Edward Kleban, Fred Ebb, Sheldon Harnick, Peter Allen, Barry Manilow, Carole Bayer Sager, and Stephen Sondheim, among others. The show ran for 86 performances at the 22 Steps Theatre in New York City.[4] Television An early television role for Newman was in a 1959 episode of Beverly Garland's crime drama Decoy. In 1960 she was cast as Doris Hudson on the CBS summer replacement series Diagnosis: Unknown, with Patrick O'Neal as the pathologist Dr. Daniel Coffee and Martin Huston as the handyman named Link. Newman became a major television celebrity of the 1960s and 1970s, a frequent panelist on the top-rated network game shows What's My Line?, Match Game and To Tell the Truth and a perennial guest of Johnny Carson's on NBC's The Tonight Show. She portrayed Melissa's mother Elaine on the television series Thirtysomething. She created the role of Renée Buchanan on the ABC soap opera One Life to Live and was a regular on the prime time series 100 Centre Street and the NBC satirical series That Was The Week That Was. Other television credits include The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Burke's Law, ABC Stage 67, Murder, She Wrote, The Wild Wild West. Newman starred in the short-lived comedy about a couple living in an Arizona retirement community, Coming of Age, opposite veteran actors Paul Dooley, Glynis Johns and Alan Young. Film On screen, Newman appeared in Picnic (1955), Let's Rock (1958), Bye Bye Braverman (1968), To Find a Man (1972), Mannequin (1987), Only You (1994), The Beautician and the Beast (1997), A Price Above Rubies (1998) and The Human Stain (2003). Music In addition to her appearances on original cast recordings, Newman recorded an album of contemporary songs, Those Were the Days, for Sire Records in 1968. In England, the album was released as Phyllis Newman's World of Music on London Records. The Phyllis Newman Women's Health Initiative In 1995 Newman founded The Phyllis Newman Women's Health Initiative of the Actors Fund of America. Since then she hosted the annual Nothing Like a Dame galas, which have raised more than US $3.5 million and served 2,500 women in the entertainment industry. In 2009 Newman received the first Isabelle Stevenson Award, a special Tony Award, for her work with the Health Initiative. This award recognizes "an individual from the theatre community for [his or her] humanitarian work." Memoir Her memoir Just in Time – Notes from My Life (1988; Simon & Schuster; ISBN 978-0-671-61880-3), relates her career, life with her husband, lyricist and playwright Adolph Green, and her bout with cancer. Personal life and death Newman was married to lyricist and playwright Adolph Green from 1960 until his death in 2002. She was the mother of journalist Adam Green and singer-songwriter Amanda Green. Newman died on September 15, 2019 at the age of 86 from complications of a lung disorder.
  • 03/19
    1933

    Birthday

    March 19, 1933
    Birthdate
    Jersey City, NJ
    Birthplace
  • Ethnicity & Family History

    Newman was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, the daughter of Rachael, a fortune teller, and Sigmund Newman, a handwriting analyst, both boardwalk workers. Her parents were Eastern European Jewish immigrants. She attended Lincoln High School where she was voted "Future Hollywood Star." Broadway
  • Professional Career

    Musical Comedy Star Ms. Newman won a Tony in 1962 as best featured actress in a musical for “Subways Are for Sleeping,” whose book and lyrics were written by her husband, Adolph Green, and his regular collaborator, Betty Comden. In the show, Ms. Newman played a long-term resident of the Brunswick Arms who, to stave off eviction, has shut herself in her room, a role that required Ms. Newman to spend the play in an unusual costume. “Her line is that she is sick,” Howard Taubman wrote of the character in his review in The New York Times, “and to prove it she wears a towel wrapped around her excellently appointed torso. The only addition to her costume all evening is a pair of black gloves.” The musical ran for 205 performances, not an enduring hit but good enough to earn her the Tony over another emerging star, Barbra Streisand, who had been nominated in the same category for “I Can Get It for You Wholesale.” The night Ms. Newman won the Tony, she was seated next to the producer David Merrick, who, she recalled in a 2004 interview with The Times, “turned to me and said, ‘I voted for Barbra Streisand.’ And then they announced my name. It was one of the sweetest moments in life.”
  • Personal Life & Family

    Broadway Star and an author. She also appeared in movies and television shows.
  • 09/15
    2019

    Death

    September 15, 2019
    Death date
    Unknown
    Cause of death
    New York, New York United States
    Death location
  • Obituary

    Phyllis Newman, Tony Award-Winning Star, Is Dead at 86 She was also a familiar face on television and raised millions of dollars to help women in entertainment deal with health problems. Phyllis Newman with Orson Bean in the Broadway show “Subways Are for Sleeping.” Her performance won her a Tony in 1962 as best featured actress in a musical. Phyllis Newman, a Tony Award-winning actress who was a fixture of New York theater for more than a half-century, a familiar game show panelist and a fund-raiser on behalf of women in entertainment dealing with illness, died on Sunday at her home in Manhattan. She was 86. Her death was confirmed by her daughter, Amanda Green. Ms. Newman accumulated a half-dozen more Broadway credits, receiving a Tony nomination for her last, in 1986, in the Neil Simon play “Broadway Bound.” She also appeared Off Broadway, including in the Nicky Silver play “The Food Chain” in 1995 and James Lapine’s “The Moment When” in 2000. Ms. Newman in a 1998 production of Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies” at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, Ms. Newman’s career came to include television and movies as well. In the 1960s and ’70s she was a frequent panelist on the game shows “What’s My Line?,” “Password,” “To Tell the Truth” and “The Match Game.” Her wit drew admirers, including the talk show host Johnny Carson, who made her a frequent guest on “The Tonight Show.” Later in life Ms. Newman made a mark as a women’s health advocate and fund-raiser. After learning more than 30 years ago that she had breast cancer, she founded the Phyllis Newman Women’s Health Initiative, a program of the Actors Fund of America. She went on to raise millions of dollars for the fund, efforts that brought her a special Tony, the Isabelle Stevenson Award, in 2009. Ms. Newman was born on March 19, 1933, in Jersey City. But her acting career began in Atlantic City. Her mother, Rachel Newman, had immigrated from Lithuania and worked as a fortuneteller on the Atlantic City boardwalk. Her father, Sigmund Archur, came from Warsaw and was a hypnotist. At age 4, Ms. Newman performed in a Carmen Miranda routine at hotels. “We were just your ordinary all-American family trying to make a buck in the summer before the ‘big war,’” she recalled in her 1988 book, “Just in Time: Notes From My Life.” Ms. Newman got her start on Broadway as a child in the short-lived musical “You’ll See Stars” in 1942. A decade later she had a role in the musical “Wish You Were Here”; later in the 1950s she was one of Judy Holliday’s understudies in “Bells Are Ringing,” for which Mr. Green and Ms. Comden wrote the book and lyrics. Ms. Newman and Mr. Green married in 1960. In a 1998 interview with The Star Ledger of Newark, she recalled with some pique having to audition multiple times for “Subways Are for Sleeping,” even though he was one of its authors. “My husband watched me audition five times,” she said. “I was livid! Believe me, this was the first time an actress got the part by not sleeping with the author.” Jack Viertel, a senior vice president at Jujamcyn Theaters and the author of “The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built,” described Ms. Newman as “a little bit outlandish, a little bit unpredictable.” “That sort of gave her a unique quality in the realm of how youngish women were treated in the ’60s onstage,” he said. Her next Broadway appearance was as a replacement player in “The Apple Tree,” and then, in 1971, she was in a revival of “On the Town.” Clive Barnes, in his review in The Times, said she “danced and sang with just the right style and gusto.” Ms. Newman and her husband were at the center of the New York theater world, friendly with Leonard Bernstein, Jule Styne, Harold Prince and more. Ms. Newman, though, didn’t have quite as full a stage career as some of her contemporaries. Ms. Newman at her home in Manhattan in 2004. After a long career in theater, television and movies, she made a mark as a women’s health advocate and fund-raiser. Ms. Newman at her home in Manhattan in 2004. After a long career in theater, television and movies, she made a mark as a women’s health advocate and fund-raiser. CreditChester Higgins Jr./The New York Times “I know everybody in the world,” she lamented to The Times in 1969, “and they never hire me for anything.” Perhaps driven by that frustration, she expanded into cabaret. In one incarnation of her show in the late 1960s, she did impersonations of women whose stars had shone brighter than hers. “Hello, gawjus,” she would say in a bit impersonating Ms. Streisand, whom she had once bested for that Tony; she’d then sing, “People, people who are Barbra, are the luckiest people in the world.” She drew on her own experiences in 1978 for a musical show originally titled “My Mother Was a Fortune Teller,” an Off Broadway production directed by Arthur Laurents. The next year, with her and Mr. Laurents now credited as authors, a revised version of it called “The Madwoman of Central Park West” ran for 85 performances on Broadway. Mr. Green died in 2002. In addition to their daughter, Ms. Green, a Broadway lyricist and composer, Ms. Newman is survived by their son, Adam Green, a theater critic. Ms. Green said her parents had inspired her and her brother’s careers. “We saw how much fun they were having, doing what they were doing,” she said. After her cancer diagnosis, Ms. Newman set an example for other women by talking about her experience and feelings openly at a time when many cancer survivors were still uncomfortable doing so. “The first time I was asked about my mastectomies on television, I was shocked,” she once told The Boston Globe. “It was hard to say the words ‘breast cancer’ on television. Breasts are so personal.” “I do know this,” she added. “A positive mental attitude has a positive effect on my body. It helps the healing process. I refused to believe that I was going to die quickly.”
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16 Memories, Stories & Photos about Phyllis

Phyllis Newman
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Phyllis Newman's Family Tree & Friends

Phyllis Newman's Family Tree

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Adolph Green

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Phyllis Newman

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