Tessie O'Shea on AllMovie

Though her signature song was "Two-Ton Tessie From Tennessee," Tessie O'Shea was anything but. The slim Welsh actress/singer started out in British films in the mid-'40s with The Immortal Battalion/The Way Out (1944). She made her Broadway debut in 1963 and won a Tony for her performance in The Girl Who Came to Supper. In 1964, O'Shea was a regular on the short-lived CBS variety show The Entertainers. Her work in the 1968 made-for-television version of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde garnered her an Emmy nomination.