BILLIE BURKE

Billie Burke (born Mary William Ethelbert Appleton Burke) was an actress from the 1910s to the 1960s. She is best remembered as Glenda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz, but she had been a major leading Broadway stage actress starting prior to 1910, and she became a leading movie actress starting in 1916, and continuing through the 1920s (and because she had been a Broadway star, she starred in her very first movie, "Peggy", in 1916). In 1921 she married showman Flo Ziegfeld, creator of "The Ziegfeld Follies", and she mostly retired from acting, but financial reversals caused by the Stock Market Crash in 1929 caused her to come out of retirement. She returned to the movies with many roles in the 1930s, and continued acting all the way until 1960! Some of her many other movies include: Merrily We Live (nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for this film), Father of the Bride, Dinner at Eight, Topper, The Man Who Came to Dinner, and Father's Little Dividend. Her to marriage Flo Ziegfeld was covered (highly fictionalized) in the movie "The Great Ziegfeld". She passed away in 1970 at the age of 85.