Comedienne Dorothy Loudon had the confidence and talent to make anything or anyone around her funny. The veteran singer/entertainer earned the respect of theatergoers long ago with her hilarious, fully played-out characters on the musical stage.
She was born in Boston in 1925 and grew up in both Indianapolis and Claremont, New Hampshire. Her mother was a department store piano player who taught Dorothy to sing as well as tickle the ivories, and made certain she attended dance classes regularly. Dorothy earned a drama scholarship to Syracuse University, which led to her transferring to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City. She started out as a nightclub chanteuse in 1954 but a club owner saw her potential in satire and farce and encouraged her to parody her torchy vocal style. She proved a tremendous hit caricaturizing everyone from Ella Fitzgerald to Shirley Temple in her act and headlined all the best clubs and cabarets, from the Ruban Bleu to the Blue Angel. Over the years the boisterous blonde developed a strong cult audience in New York. Garry Moore brought her regularly to TV in the early 1960s and in 1962 she won a Theatre World Award for her Broadway debut "Nowhere to Go But Up," a musical. A master at the slow take, her comic wackiness somehow never managed to infiltrate films or TV the way it should have, her delightfully saucy eccentricities maybe a bit much. She starred in the short-lived sitcom Dorothy (1979) and made only two movies during the course of her career. She was crushed when Carol Burnett, whom she replaced on The Garry Moore Show (1958), got to play Miss Hannigan in Annie (1982), the role she had played in the 1977 Broadway play. Dorothy certainly shined on the cabaret circuit and especially on Broadway, however, earning numerous prizes over the years, topped by her Tony Award win for "Annie". Other theater highlights include replacing Angela Lansbury in "Sweeney Todd" in 1980 and playing opposite Katharine Hepburn in "West Side Waltz" in 1981. She was quite in her element in the raucous slapstick farce "Noises Off" in 1983, although recreating her Hannigan role in "Annie 2" did not pay off.
She suffered from uterine cancer in the last year of her life and was forced to leave the Broadway production of "Dinner at Eight" in 2002. She died at age 78 the following year.
