Phyllis Newman (born 1933)

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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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