Alice Ghostley

Alice Ghostley — Alice Margaret Ghostley — American stage and screen comedian whose dithering brilliance made her a fixture of Broadway, television sitcoms, and film, died in Studio City, California, on September 21, 2007, of colon cancer and a series of strokes. She was eighty-four. Born August 14, 1923, in Eve, Missouri (often listed with nearby Vernon County roots), she trained for the stage, won a Tony nomination for The Beauty Part, and became nationally familiar as Esmeralda on Bewitched and later as Bernice Clifton on Designing Women. She could play panic as music — the flustered neighbor, the well-meaning disaster, the woman whose timing made chaos adorable without cruelty. Film roles in To Kill a Mockingbird and Grease showed a quieter register; nightclub and revue work earlier had sharpened the comic instrument that television later amplified. Colleagues remembered professionalism beneath the on-camera flutter, a craftsman’s discipline that made “scattered” look effortless and generous. Illness narrowed her final years in the San Fernando Valley. Studio City was home when the curtain fell on a career that had spanned live television’s first age and cable’s sitcom afterlife. She died in Studio City on September 21, 2007. Reruns still introduce her to viewers who recognize the voice before the credit. Ghostley’s gift was precision disguised as confusion — comic timing that honored the joke without humiliating the character. Notice Nearby keeps the death date so September 21 remembers the Missouri-born actress who made American television’s flustered women unforgettable.