PENNY SINGLETON

Penny Singleton (born Mariana Dorothy Agnes Letitia McNulty) was an actress from 1930 through 1990. Most movie fans (even major buffs) know her solely as the pretty blonde actress who starred as Blondie in the very popular long-running series of movies adapted from the newspaper comic strip. However, she had an interesting career prior to that! At six, she was a child actress in the "Kiddie Kabaret" (kind of a school for child actors), and she was billed as "Penny McNulty". As a young adult, she began to appear in movies as "Dorothy McNulty". In 1936, she was noticed as a dancer in "After the Thin Man", and two years later, she had another good role in "Swing Your Lady". That led her to getting the lead role in 1938's "Blondie", but she had to bleach her hair (she had always been a brunette prior to that), and she changed her name to Penny Singleton. Both the name and the bleached blonde hair stuck for the remainder of her long career! Note that she also provided the voice of Jane Jetson for the popular Hanna-Barbera TV cartoon show, "The Jetsons"! She passed away in 2003 at the age of 95.