Mitzi Gaynor answered her own phone until the end. When a Tribune reporter called in 2013, she picked up and chirped "Hi, darling! It's Mitzi!" like she'd known you her whole life. That was the whole point with her — she had known you her whole life, because she performed like every single person in the audience was the reason she was there.
Gaynor died at 93, and with her goes one of the last real song-and-dance queens from Hollywood's most extravagant era. Not a dancer who could sing, not a singer who could dance — she was both, doing both, usually at the same time, usually with a smile that felt like it could pay your rent.
Her defining moment was Ensign Nellie Forbush in the 1958 film of South Pacific. It wasn't an easy role to build — a brash, big-hearted Navy女 Navy女 — but Gaynor attacked it with everything she had. She wasn't delicate about it, and that was the point. Nellie wasn't delicate. She was loud and flawed and desperately sincere, and Gaynor played her like someone who understood that loving too much is better than pretending you don't care at all.
Critics who wanted her to be Audrey Hepburn got frustrated. Audiences who wanted to feel something got exactly what they came for.
What nobody talks about enough is how hard she worked to stay in the room. Hollywood has always eaten its young, and women especially got treated like leases with expiration dates. Gaynor kept working — live shows, television, stage appearances — not because she had to, but because stopping would have meant admitting the world had moved on without her. She wasn't having it.
The last generations of her fans discovered her on streaming, rewinding the same scene from South Pacific over and over, trying to figure out what made her so magnetic on screen. The answer was that she wasn't trying to be likable. She was trying to be alive — every gesture, every breath, every moment. That's a harder thing to teach than any choreography.
She never married again after her divorce from actor Bob BBScali, preferring the company of her dogs and her pool in Palm Springs, and said so without bitterness. "I'm not lonely," she told one interviewer. "Lonely is what happens when you need someone else to feel whole. I'm fine."
That's the part nobody writes about when these performers die — the decades after the marquee lights go dim, the private life that has nothing to do with the gold lamé and the feathered headpieces. She got to grow old on her own terms, in her own house, answering her own phone.
The musical film genre she helped define has been declared dead a dozen times and keeps finding new ways to breathe. But nobody does it the way she did — wide open, all in, joy as a discipline. That's gone now. Not forgotten. Just gone.
