Vivienne Segal

Active - 1930 - 1934  |   Born - Apr 19, 1897   |   Died - Dec 19, 1992   |   Genres - Drama, Musical, Comedy

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Biography by AllMovie

Vivacious, tart-tongued Broadway diva Vivienne Segal was never given her proper due by Hollywood -- far from it, in fact. Having been pushed upon the wicked stage at the age of 15 by a typical stage mother, Segal found fame and fortune as one of Broadway's most popular ingénues, reaching an early career high as Constance in Florenz Ziegfeld's 1928 production of Rudolph Friml's The Three Musketeers. The newly sound-equipped Warner Bros. immediately beckoned, but Song of the West and Bride of the Regiment and Golden Dawn (all 1930) were flops, the last mentioned of near cataclysmic proportions. If briefly down, Segal was far from out, rebounding as Countess Palaffi in Rodgers & Hart's 1938 I Married an Angel, in which she sang the plaintive "Spring Is Here," and as the slumming socialite Vera Simpson in Pal Joey, stopping that 1940 hit with the unforgettable "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered." Lorenz Hart, otherwise not exactly known as a ladies' man, declared her his eternal devotion and wrote his final song especially for her, "To Keep My Love Alive." The occasion was the 1943 revival of A Connecticut Yankee and Segal made a devilishly attractive Morgan le Fay. Divorced from television executive Hubbell Robinson Jr., Segal spent her final years as a virtual recluse in a small house in Hollywood.