Early Life and Career
Born in New York City, Pearce was educated in Europe and returned to the United States as an adult. She began working in nightclubs as a comedian and was cast in the original Broadway production of On the Town (1944-1946). Gene Kelly was so impressed by her that she became the only cast member to be included in the film version in 1949. Her comedic performance was well received by critics and public alike, and she was given her own television variety show. More movie roles followed, and she made appearances on Broadway, where she met her husband, director Paul Davis, during a production of Bells Are Ringing.
In 1964 she joined the cast of the television series Bewitched. As the nagging and nosy neighbor, Gladys Kravitz, Pearce's scenes were almost entirely reactions to acts of witchcraft she had witnessed at the house across the street. Her hysterical accusations against Samantha, played by Elizabeth Montgomery, and the disbelief of her husband Abner (George Tobias), provided a common thread through many of the series' early episodes. Pearce was posthumously awarded an Emmy Award for this role.
Read more about this topic: Alice Pearce
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“The conviction that the best way to prepare children for a harsh, rapidly changing world is to introduce formal instruction at an early age is wrong. There is simply no evidence to support it, and considerable evidence against it. Starting children early academically has not worked in the past and is not working now.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life. All these dead, mechanized, specialized actions, stealing a little bit of life a thousand times a day until the mind and body are exhausted, until that death which is not the end of life but the final saturation with absence.”
—Raoul Vaneigem (b. 1934)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)