Biographie

While appearing in a stage play, during one performance she was about to launch into her big speech, as a wife berating her husband, when the prop telephone on the set rang. Correctly deducing that this was a practical joke arranged by the actor playing the husband, she grabbed up the phone, and without missing a beat ad-libbed along the lines of "Well, he's busy ... He really can't ... oh, very well ..." and then turned to her grinning cohort and wiped the smile off his face by snapping "It's for you!" and handing him the phone. She stood there tapping her foot while he ad-libbed a rather unconvincing conversation, and then, after he hung up, went on with the scene as if nothing had happened.

Often disguised her true age, but her tombstone was engraved by her family with the years "1908-1990", so she was 82 at her death.

Was a longtime friend of Jane Wyman, who attended her funeral in 1990. Arden guest-starred opposite Wyman on Falcon Crest (1981).

Eve Arden was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 1995.

She has appeared in three films that have been selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant: Le roman de Mildred Pierce (1945), Autopsie d'un meurtre (1959) and Grease (1978).