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Judy Holliday, who won an Oscar and a niche in theatrical history for her performance as the junk dealer’s squeaky-voiced girl friend in “Born Yesterday,” died Monday of cancer.
When Holliday became ill and had to leave the show, it closed in Philadelphia without opening on Broadway. Holliday had surgery for a throat tumor shortly after leaving the production in October 1960.
NEW YORK (UPl)—Judy Holliday, the intellectually brilliant actress who won an Academy Award playing dumb blondes, died early today in her sleep at Mt. Sinai Hospital after a five-year battle against cancer.
She then signed with Columbia Pictures, who cast her in the film version of her Broadway success, Born Yesterday, which was released in 1950 and is probably the role most closely associated with Holliday.
Judy Holliday, whose portrayal of a junk dealer's doxy in "Born Yesterday" created a new kind of beautiful-but-dumb blonde, died of cancer yesterday. She was 42 years old.
She had a mastectomy in 1961, but the cancer later returned. She started chemotherapy in 1975, which worked for eight months but wasn’t successful in the last two months of her life, according to her obituary. One obituary said she had stomach chancer.
Yet, five years later, Judy died on June 7, 1965, from metastatic breast cancer. Breast cancer is "the most common cancer in the UK", the charity Breast Cancer UK notes.
Judy Holliday appeared in one last musical, the unsuccessful Hot Spot in 1963, and was writing lyrics to songs by the jazz saxophonist Gerry Mulligan at the time of her death. She died of breast cancer on June 7, 1965, two weeks before her 43rd birthday.
Judy was an only child. By the age of four, her mother had her enrolled in ballet school which fostered a life-long interest in show business. Two years later her parents divorced. In high school, Judy began to develop an interest in theater. She appeared in several high school plays.
Holliday’s life and career were not easy and smooth. She was accused in Red Channels of Communist leanings during the loathesome McCarthy era. She refused to name names.