Barbara Perry (actress)

Barbara Perry (June 22, 1921 – May 5, 2019) was an American actress, singer and dancer who worked for 84 years in Hollywood and on Broadway.

Career
Barbara began her film career in 1933, when she appeared in Counsellor at Law. She also had a small part in The Mystery of Edwin Drood in 1935.

She headlined as a solo dancer (ballet-tap) in many top line nightclubs internationally, including work on Broadway and off-Broadway, in various productions. She was Eddie Foy Jr.'s dance partner, playing Anna in "Rumple" at the Alvin Theatre in 1957. In 1950 she was Mrs. Larry in Happy as Larry on Broadway.

By the mid-1950s to the early-1960s, she had studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, England, while performing opposite George Formby, Warde Donovan, and Sara Gregory in Zip Goes a Million at the Hippodrome and Palace Theatres, and upon her return to the USA had started appearing in numerous television series such as Perry Mason,The Donna Reed Show, The Andy Griffith Show, My Three Sons, and The Dick Van Dyke Show, where she played Buddy Sorrell's wife Pickles, before being replaced by Joan Shawlee.

In 1981, Perry wrote and performed in Passionate Ladies, a one-woman Broadway show at the Bijou Theatre. Her other Broadway plays included Swan Song (1946), If the Shoe Fits (1946), Happy as Larry (1950), and Rumple (1957).

She also played Thelma Brockwood on The Hathaways.

Perry's last known role was in the television series Baskets.

Personal life
Her second marriage was to animator Art Babbitt on April 14, 1967, in Hollywood, California, until his death in 1992. They had no children.

Perry died on May 5, 2019, in Los Angeles at the age of 97.