Edie Adams

Edie Adams, the Tony-winning singer, actress and comedian who sparkled beside her husband Ernie Kovacs in early television and later rebuilt her life and career after his sudden death, died in Los Angeles on October 15, 2008. She was eighty-one. She was born Edith Elizabeth Enke on April 16, 1927, in Kingston, Pennsylvania, and grew up in several Pennsylvania towns and in Tenafly, New Jersey. Her mother, a trained soprano, taught her singing and piano, and her grandmother taught her to sew. She earned a voice degree at the Juilliard School, went on to the Columbia School of Drama, and later studied at the Actors Studio. Television brought her to Kovacs, the inventive comic whose shows she joined in the early 1950s; they married in 1954. She was his partner in sketches and songs and gained a following for affectionate impressions of glamorous stars, especially Marilyn Monroe. On Broadway she appeared in Wonderful Town in 1953 and won a Tony Award as Daisy Mae in Li'l Abner. She played the Fairy Godmother in the 1957 television premiere of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella. Kovacs was killed in a car accident in January 1962, leaving her deeply in debt. She declined charity and went to work, paying off the obligations through steady performing. Over the following decades she appeared in films including The Apartment and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, hosted her own variety program, earned an Emmy nomination, and for twenty years was the memorable spokeswoman for Muriel Cigars. She also founded two beauty businesses, Edie Adams Cosmetics and Edie Adams Cut 'n' Curl. She devoted years and her own money to preserving her husband's television work, buying back tapes and films that networks were discarding, and spoke publicly about the loss of early broadcasts. Much of what survives of Kovacs's pioneering comedy exists because of her. She died of cancer and pneumonia and was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in the Hollywood Hills, beside Kovacs and between her daughter, Mia, and her stepdaughter, Kippie.