The actor and singer Mitzi Gaynor, best remembered as the star of the 1958 film musical South Pacific, began her showbiz career as an ingenue – the young, pretty female stock character whose marriage ends old-style comedies: the audience never gets to see her grow into a woman. And a bubbly ingenue Gaynor remained throughout a long performing life, still working her adorability when she made her Manhattan cabaret debut at Feinstein’s in 2010 at 78.
Gaynor, who has died aged 93, had talent. Her speaking tended to the cute, though she had enough belt as a singer to be plausibly cast into the vaudeville family of There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954), as Ethel Merman’s daughter – they duetted brassily. She was a competent enough dancer to carry the centre of Jack Cole-choreographed routines in The I Don’t Care Girl (1953) and hoof with the skilled Donald O’Connor in Anything Goes (1956). But, as she remarked ruefully in later years, what she had never been was sexy.
