Actress and philanthropist
Born: December 29, 1923;
Died: May 22, 2017
DINA Merrill, who has died aged 93, was born into a wealthy American family and grew up on the Florida estate now owned by President Trump. Her father hoped she might become a lawyer and enter Congress, but against her family’s wishes she opted instead for modelling and subsequently a career in film and television.
She was regularly cast in patrician roles and on several occasions she played an upper-class woman who loses her partner to a rival several rungs below her on the social ladder – Elizabeth Taylor won an Oscar for her performance as the self-declared “slut” who provides competition for Laurence Harvey’s affections in Butterfield 8 (1960).
By the time Merrill began acting, she was already a millionaire – and that was back in the day when being a millionaire meant you were very rich indeed. She would eventually inherit a fortune of more than $50 million. Although she continued acting into her seventies, latterly she devoted much of her time and money to charitable work.
She was born Nedenia Marjorie Hutton in 1923 in New York City. Her father was a successful Wall Street broker and her mother’s family owned a leading cereals company. They lived for much of the time in a 115-room mansion at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, though there was also a luxury yacht, described as a “floating palace”, with marble bathrooms. Guests included the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
It was a cosseted lifestyle, but Merrill envied the girls who began their days with the camaraderie of the school bus, when she had only the family chauffeur for company on her journey. Her parents divorced when she was ten.
She studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, modelled clothes for Vogue magazine and acted on Broadway.
In 1946 she married Stanley Rumbough Jr, an heir to the Colgate-Palmolive business, and spent most of the next decade at home with their three children. She began getting work in television and films in the mid-1950s, playing an officer in The Phil Silvers Show (1956), a military nurse in Operation Petticoat (1959) and a bored rancher’s wife in the Australian drama The Sundowners (1960).
During the 1960s she made guest appearances in a number of hit television shows, including Bonanza (1966) and Mission: Impossible (1969). She played the Wild West villainess Calamity Jan (sic) in the camp TV version of Batman (1968) alongside her second husband Cliff Robertson, who was Shame (sic).
In the 1970s and 1980s she worked largely in television. Later film credits include Caddyshack II (1988) and Robert Altman’s The Player (1992).
Her first two marriages ended in divorce. She is survived by her third husband Ted Hartley, a banker and businessman, with whom she bought control of the once-great RKO studio and they produced a remake of Mighty Joe Young in 1998.
She is also survived by a son and a daughter. Another son died in a boating accident in 1973, aged 23, and her younger daughter died of cancer in 2007.
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