Biografia

One of the many celebrities who feuded with controversial gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen. In fact, one night Gingold appeared on Tonight Starring Jack Paar (1957) to be interviewed by Paar, who also was feuding with Kilgallen. When she walked out on stage she was carrying a picture of Kilgallen with a toilet seat as a frame.

Originally a dramatic actress with a coloratura soprano singing voice, her throaty purr developed and deepened as a result of vocal nodules, which her mother insisted she not remove.

Perhaps best remembered as the retired courtesan in "Gigi" in which she dueted "I Remember it Well" with Maurice Chevalier. She won theatre's Donaldson Award for "John Murray Anderson's Almanac" in 1954.

Lost most of her hair in her '70s and wore a wig to hide it. When she auditioned for the Broadway show 'A Little Night Music' she used this as an advantage - to show how much she had in common with the elderly character she was playing, she finished her audition by removing her wig. The astonished producers hired her immediately.

Was nominated for Broadway's 1973 Tony Award as Best Supporting or Featured Actress (Musical) for "A Little Night Music," a role she recreated in the film version of the same name, Um Pouco de Música Noturna (1977).

(humorously comparing - in a stage revue - Sir Donald Wolfit's old-fashioned and somewhat stereotypical performance as Richard III with Laurence Olivier's): "Olivier is a tour-de-force, and Wolfit is forced to tour".

Really, sex and laughter do go very well together, and I wondered - and I still do - which is more important.

Fighting is essentially a masculine idea; a woman's weapon is her tongue.

"The nearest my mother ever got to telling me the facts of life was the day she called me to her room and said she had something important to tell me. After a good deal of embarassed coughing she spluttered, 'Don't ever sit down on a strange lavatory seat'".

[on auditioning for "A Little Night Music"] "I'd played for royalty, but Steve Sondheim and Hal Prince were too much for me. The only one who frightened me more was Noël Coward."