Peggy Lee

Peggy Lee 1920-2002, American singer and songwriter, b. Jamestown, N.D., as Norma Deloris Egstrom. Lee became famous for her singular voice—sexy, subtle, simultaneously smoky and cool—and her unique jazz-inflected interpretations of popular tunes. She began singing as a teenager and hit the big time in 1941 when Benny Goodman hired her. She scored her first big hit in 1942 with "Why Don't You Do Right?" Leaving Goodman's band in 1943, she became a solo act and cowrote (with husband Dave Barbour) and performed a number of popular songs including "It's a Good Day" (1947) and the 1948 chart-topper "Mañana." Lee wrote or cowrote more than 200 songs and recorded more than 600, among them the sultry "Fever" (1958) and "Is That All There Is?" (1969), her late-career anthem. Lee was in several films, notably acting in The Jazz Singer (1952) and Pete Kelly's Blues (1955), voiced such animated features as The Lady and the Tramp (1955), appeared on numerous television programs, and continued to perform into the 1990s.

Bibliography: See her autobiography (1989, rev. ed. 2002); chronology by R. Strom (2005); biography by P. Richmond (2006).

Withers, Googie [ Georgette Lizette] (1917– ), English actress, born in India, who studied for the stage under Italia Conti and made her début in the children's play The Windmill Man (1929) by Frederick Bowyer. She was then seen in the chorus of the musical comedy Nice Goings On (1933) before appearing in J. B. Priestley's Duet in Floodlight (1935); after N. C. Hunter's Ladies and Gentlemen (1937) she was in another Priestley play They Came to a City (1943). In 1945 she took over the part of Amanda in Coward's Private Lives, following it with Lee in Ronald Millar's farcical comedy Champagne for Delilah (1949) and Georgie Elgin in Odets's Winter Journey (1952), giving one of her finest performances as the supportive wife of an alcoholic actor. Later in 1952 she succeeded Peggy Ashcroft as Hester Collyer in Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea, a part in which in 1955 she toured Australia and New Zealand with her Australian-born actor husband John McCallum (1914– ), who partnered her in several later productions. In 1958 she played Gertrude in Hamlet and Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. In the same year her husband entered theatrical management with J. C. Williamson Theatres Ltd. in Australia, and much of her later acting has been done in Australia and New Zealand. She made her début in New York in 1961 in Graham Greene's The Complaisant Lover and was seen in Edinburgh and London in 1963 in Ionesco's Exit the King, and at the Strand Theatre in 1967 in Shaw's Getting Married. She then returned to Australia for some years, touring and playing Ranevskaya in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard (1972) for the Melbourne Theatre Company. In 1976 she was back in England, appearing at Chichester and in London as Lady Kitty in Maugham's The Circle. She was again at Chichester as Lady Bracknell in Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1979) and in such productions as Priestley's Time and the Conways (1983) and Anouilh's Ring round the Moon (1988).