Broadway Performer, Playwright Was 97

June Walker Rogers, a singer, dancer and comic who carried out on Broadway and tv and wrote a number of musicals and a ebook about methods to survive in present enterprise, has died. She was 97.

She died July 8 at her residence in Westport, Connecticut, her household introduced.

Born in Steubenville, Ohio, and raised in Queens, June L. Walker began dancing at age 5 and shortly had a nightclub act, showing on payments with the likes of Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Louis Prima, Don Rickles, Rodney Dangerfield and, when he was often known as the singer “Calypso Gene,” Louis Farrakhan.

After being positioned in an accelerated pilot program for presented youngsters within the New York faculty system, she graduated from highschool at 15. She accepted a scholarship to Columbia College however left school to make her Broadway debut in 1944 within the comedy revue Laffing Room Solely, starring Ole Olsen & Stylish Johnson.

The platinum blond returned to Broadway in 1959 to work alongside Bert Lahr and Dick Van Dyke in The Ladies Towards the Boys.

Walker Rogers starred in Guys & Dolls with Tony Bennett and Little Me with Orson Bean and in such different musicals as Bells Are Ringing, Mame and Oklahoma. She additionally starred with Hal Linden and Rance Howard throughout her profession.

On tv, she appeared on packages hosted by Steve Allen, Jack Paar, Jackie Gleason and Ed Sullivan, who introduced her to carry out on the White Home for Presidents Truman and Eisenhower.

After beginning a household, she turned to writing, contributing to such musicals as All American, written with Charles Strouse and Lee Adams; The Dream on Royal Road, written with Alan Menken and her late husband, David Rogers; and 45 Minutes From Broadway, based mostly on the work of George M. Cohan.

Her play Heidi was produced on the Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena to introduce cultural arts to California faculties, and her 1986 ebook, How one can Make It in Showbiz: A Survival Equipment, was learn in college theater departments throughout the nation.

In later years, she returned to the stage to carry out reverse George Grizzard in The Excellent Get together on the Westport Nation Playhouse and with members of the family in The Excellent Marriage ceremony.

A longtime resident of Westport, she was a founding member of the Theater Artists Workshop of Westport and a member of the Nationwide League of American Pen Ladies.

Survivors embrace her daughters, Dulcy (and her husband, actor Diedrich Bader) and Amanda (former spouse of Frank Ferrante, the famed Groucho Marx impersonator), and her grandchildren, Lucy, Sebastian, Dashiell and Ondine.

She and David Rogers, the composer, actor and Tony-nominated lyricist, had been married for 50 years till his loss of life in 2013.