A classy lady, Kitty Carlisle Hart, is dead at the age of 96. She did a lot of fine movies but when you're in A Night at the Opera with the Marx Brothers (as she was), it's understandable that people forget all the others.
She was Kitty Carlisle then. She became Kitty Carlisle Hart when she married playwright-director Moss Hart and became his partner in every sense, even to the extent of aiding him when he directed shows like My Fair Lady. After his death, she became the guardian of his legacy, making sure that the plays and his autobiography, Act One, were kept available and treated with the proper respect.
Many people probably know her best from the game show, To Tell the Truth, where she was a longtime panelist. She had a refreshing honesty and seemed to really enjoy what she did. If anyone from GSN (aka The Game Show Network) is reading this and thinking of running some episodes as a tribute, there was one — it was on the daytime version during, I believe, the Garry Moore era — where the impostors were all under heavy make-up. When they unmasked at the end, one turned out to be her son, Christopher, and she practically fell off her chair. If GSN can dig that one out of the vaults, I think people would love to see her wonderful reaction.
The last few years, despite being in her nineties, she performed occasionally in both New York and L.A. with a one-woman show where she sang songs and told anecdotes about her incredible life. Somehow, maddeningly, I never got the chance to see her, nor was I able to accept an invite to go have a meal with her in Manhattan. We did exchange notes once. She made a brief appearance in Woody Allen's Radio Days and I wrote her a note to let her know that at the Writers Guild screening, a roar of recognition and applause had greeted her appearance on the screen. She wrote back a cordial letter that said something like, "I would rather be applauded by a roomful of writers than all the other people on the planet." Indeed.
Here's a link to one of several obits on the 'net today.