Dorothy Lamour - Later Career

Later Career

Lamour's good humor and lack of pretension allowed her to have a remarkably long career in show business for someone best known as a glamour girl. She was a popular draw on the dinner theatre circuit of the 1970s. In the 1960s and 1970s, she lived with her longtime husband William Ross Howard III (whom she married in 1943), in the Baltimore suburb of Sudbrook Park. He died in 1978. Lamour published her autobiography, My Side of the Road, in 1980, revived her nightclub act, and performed in plays and television shows such as Hart to Hart, Crazy Like a Fox, Remington Steele and Murder, She Wrote.

During the 1990s, she made only a handful of professional appearances but remained a popular interview subject for publications and TV talk and news programs. In 1995, the musical Swinging on a Star, a revue of songs written by Johnny Burke opened on Broadway and ran for three months; Lamour was credited as a "special advisor". Burke wrote many of the most famous Road to ... movie songs as well as the score to Lamour's And the Angels Sing. The musical was nominated for the Best Musical Tony Award, and the actress playing her in the Road movie segment, Kathy Fitzgerald, was also nominated.