1617) Madeline Kahn

Madeline Gail Kahn (née Wolfson; 1942 – 1999). American actress, comedian, and singer.
She is known for comedic roles in films directed by Peter Bogdanovich and Mel Brooks, including What's Up, Doc? (1972), Blazing Saddles (1974), Young Frankenstein (1974), High Anxiety (1977), History of the World, Part I (1981), and her Academy Award–nominated role in Paper Moon (1973).
Kahn made her Broadway debut in Leonard Sillman's New Faces of 1968, and received Tony Award nominations for the play In the Boom Boom Room in 1974 and for the original production of the musical On the Twentieth Century in 1978. She starred as Madeline Wayne on the short-lived sitcom Oh Madeline (1983–84) and won a Daytime Emmy Award in 1987 for an ABC Afterschool Special. She received a third Tony Award nomination for the revival of the play Born Yesterday in 1989, before winning the 1993 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for the comedy The Sisters Rosensweig. Her other film appearances included The Cheap Detective (1978), City Heat (1984), Clue (1985), and Nixon (1995).
Kahn was born in Boston, the daughter of Bernard B. Wolfson, a garment manufacturer, and his wife Freda (née Goldberg). She was raised in a nonobservant Jewish family. Her parents divorced when Kahn was two, and she moved with her mother to New York City. In 1953, Freda married Hiller Kahn, who later adopted Madeline; Freda eventually changed her own name to Paula Kahn.

- "She had beautiful skin and auburn hair, high cheekbones." https://moviestvnetwork.com/lists/mel-brooks-remembers-young-frankenstein

- "She was in her early 50s at the time, her red hair was curled and styled, not long..." https://madeline-kahn-being-the-music.blogspot.com/2009/ 

- "In the school-of-Brooks comedy, The Adventure Of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother (1975), directed and starring Gene Wilder, she was a red-haired mystery woman..." https://www.theguardian.com/news/1999/dec/06/guardianobituaries2

 

 

1616) Eileen Herlie

Eileen Herlie (1918 – 2008). Scottish-American actress.
She was born Eileen Isobel Herlihy to an Irish Catholic father, Patrick Herlihy, and a Scottish Protestant mother, Isobel Cowden, in Glasgow, Scotland. She was trained as a theatre actress. Among her West End London theatre successes were The Eagle Has Two Heads by Jean Cocteau. She was married twice, to Philip Barrett (m 1942) and Witold Kuncewicz (m 1951), both marriages ending in divorce. She had no children. In 1955 she moved permanently to the United States, where she lived and worked for the last fifty-three years of her life.
In 1942 she moved to England to work as a professional actress. Her first role in the London theatre in 1942 was as the second Mrs de Winter in Daphne du Maurier's stage adaptation of her own novel Rebecca.
In 1951 she made her first television appearance in the leading role of Regina in a BBC TV adaptation of Lillian Hellman's stage play The Little Foxes.
Herlie's first big film break was being cast by Laurence Olivier in his screen adaptation of William Shakespeare's Hamlet, shot in 1947. She played Hamlet's mother, Gertrude, for the second time. On this occasion, at 29, she was eleven years younger than her 40-year-old stage son (Olivier).
Herlie's other American film appearances in the 1960s were roles in Freud: The Secret Passion (1962), and The Sea Gull (1968), the first major film version in English of Anton Chekhov's celebrated play. (The second was her last feature film.)
In 1955, Herlie made her Broadway debut as Irene Molloy in The Matchmaker (which was later made into the musical Hello, Dolly!). In 1960, she was nominated for a Tony Award as 'Best Actress in a Musical' for Take Me Along, an adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness!
In May 1976, Herlie made the move to television soap operas in the role of Myrtle Fargate on All My Children, playing the role for virtually the rest of her life. In the 1980s, Herlie was nominated for three consecutive Daytime Emmy Awards (1984, 1985 and 1986). 

- ”I’m sure Eileen is lighting up the skies in heaven with her flaming red hair and lovely Scottish accent,” says Lucci, who’s also currently a contestant on Dancing With the Stars." https://ew.com/.../soap-watch-amc-stars-remember-eileen.../

 
- "The feisty, flaming red-haired Scot took her first Broadway bow in 1955..." https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0379047/