Doris Eaton Travis - Later Life

Later Life

In 1992, aged 88, Eaton Travis graduated cum laude from the University of Oklahoma. She was awarded an honorary doctorate from Oakland University in 2004 at the age of 100.

In 1997, she and four former Ziegfeld Girls reunited for the reopening of the New Amsterdam Theatre. She later recalled that she was the only one still able to dance.

In 1998, Eaton Travis returned to Broadway and the New Amsterdam Theatre, the same venue where she had first appeared in 1918, 80 years earlier, to participate in the Easter Bonnet Competition, a benefit for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. She became the show's "lucky charm" and an audience favorite, and continued to appear in the production almost every year, often presenting renditions of her old dances to standing ovations from the audience. In 1999 she made her first film appearance in over sixty-five years with a small role in Man on the Moon with Jim Carrey.

She appeared in several documentaries and interviews about the Ziegfeld Follies and her siblings and colleagues; she also published an autobiography and family history, entitled The Days We Danced, in 2003. In 2006, Eaton Travis was the subject of a photo-collage biography by Pulitzer Prize nominee Lauren Redniss entitled Century Girl: 100 Years in the Life of Doris Eaton Travis, Last Living Star of the Ziegfeld Follies.

In January 2008 Eaton Travis served as the Grand Marshal of the opening parade for the Art Deco Weekend festival in Miami Beach. Her last public appearance was the opening of the 2010 Easter Bonnet show on April 27, 2010. After a long life and career, Eaton Travis died of an aneurysm on May 11, 2010. On May 12, the lights of Broadway were dimmed in her honor. She is interred in the Guardian Angel Cemetery in Rochester, Michigan.