This month is one of my favorite themes: What a Character! Today we are learning about the career of Jane Connell.

Connell was born in California in 1925. After high school she attended the University of California, majoring in drama. She married her college boyfriend Gordon Connell, and they were together until her death in 2013. The couple performed together; one of their first plays was at San Francisco’s Purple Onion with May Angelou who was a calypso singer at the time.

Connell spent almost five decades in New York Theater including Broadway, summer stock, national tours, and cabaret. Jane talked about how things changed in the theater, saying “there’s no question that theater has changed through the years. The one thing that bothers me is that so many of today’s young actors come from television and have not been taught theater technique. They don’t realize when they’re upstaging you. It’s not done out of meanness or trickery. They just think there’s a camera over their shoulder that is filming the other actor. But I don’t complain about it. I just look out front and deliver the lines. I was born a character person. I was always eccentric, never a conventional beauty. I grew up in the Depression, the youngest of four kids. I wanted to make people laugh, because making my family laugh helped us forget our concerns. And I found that I could do it.”

Connell’s claim to fame happened in 1966 when she was cast as Agnes Gooch in the Broadway version of Mame. She would also appear as Agnes in the 1974 film that Lucille Ball starred in.

She appeared in ten big screen films throughout her career as well as several made-for-tv movies.

Her first television appearance was on nine episodes of Stanley in 1956. This was an early sitcom starring Buddy Hackett as a newsstand vendor in a luxury hotel where he gets involved with many of the residents and guests.

Connell showed up in many of the most popular sitcoms in the sixties and seventies including The Patty Duke Show, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, That Girl, Green Acres, Love American Style, and Maude. She was cast in six Bewitched episodes as different characters, often playing regal figures including Martha Washington, Queen Hapzibah, Queen Victoria, and Mother Goose.

She continued her movie and tv work throughout the eighties and nineties including MASH and Law and Order. Her last appearance was in 1999. At age 87 she passed away while living at the Lillian Booth Actors Home of the Actors Fun in New Jersey, leaving behind Gordon who died in 2016 and two daughters Melissa and Maggie.

I thought it was ironic that she was typically described as a tiny dynamo with a squeaky voice, being under five feet tall. However, one of her most memorable lines was on Bewitched as Queen Victoria when she said, “We are not amused”– the opposite of a tiny, squeaky-voiced character like Agnes Gooch. Thanks for being such a versatile character actor Jane Connell and treating us to so many years of entertainment.