Studio Publicity · Public domain

A wisecracking, sharp-tongued fixture of Warner Bros.' Pre-Code era, appearing in more than 100 films and television productions across a 50-year career. She'd started in vaudeville and won a beauty pageant before breaking into pictures, and kept working into her seventies, earning an Oscar nomination for The Blue Veil (1951) and a Tony nomination for The Rope Dancers (1958). Her last two films, Grease and The Champ, were released within a year of her death from leukemia in 1979.